In Pedro Almodóvar's new movie Bad Education the successful young movie director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) is clipping bizarre news items for inspiration for his next project when a young man claiming to be Ignacio Rodríguez (Gael García Bernal), a friend of his from parochial school, walks in with a story based on their experiences there. That story, which we see dramatized as Enrique reads it, shows how Enrique and Ignacio, who had fallen in love with each other, were separated by the dominating headmaster Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). Father Manolo's objections were not truly moral or spiritual: he had himself been molesting Ignacio and believed he was in love with the boy. In the story Ignacio has become a transvestite junkie and petty criminal and returns to the school where Father Manolo still exerts his iron grip to blackmail him for the cost of a sex-change operation.

As we go back and forth between reality and the story several twists develop involving the identity of the man who says he's Ignacio (but insists on being called Ángel) and Father Manolo's current life, but the story holds together in a tight little package. Almodóvar fashions the movie as a film noir, with the requisite illicit sex, betrayal, drug addiction, blackmail, and murder, but while the story is intricately worked out, we're never quite in it. The plot of a film noir, generically speaking, is an ironic romance in which the knight's quest is driven by vice instead of virtue. What makes film noir so compulsively watchable is that the morally inverted romance puts us in the position of rooting for the technically dark knight to get away with his vicious quest just as we normally root for a white knight to achieve his virtuous quest. The dark-knight protagonist of film noir presents us with a temptation that we're free to indulge without consequences because the plot isn't really happening to us.

The problem with Bad Education, then, is that Enrique's is the central perspective but the story isn't exactly happening to him, either. I don't mean to say that we can't eventually tell which episodes are meant to be "real," but that Enrique is as much an observer as a participant, if not more. Enrique is stirred, in a fairly quiet way, when Ignacio apparently re-enters his life, but he manages to get what he wants from the eye-scorching rough trade pretending to be Ignacio--sex as well as the story--while retaining his emotional control. He receives the story relatively passively, as the inspiration he's been waiting for.

One thing you can say for Bad Education is that Bernal, who plays both the tranny Ignacio in the dramatized story and the man who says he wrote the story, has never had such impact onscreen. With those gorgeous metallic-green eyes he makes a plausible if not beautiful woman (he looks like a Juliette Lewis incapable of walking gracefully in heels), but it's as the sexually ambiguous and parasitic Ángel that he's really a cork-popper. (He does some motion-of-the-ocean push-ups that made my boyfriend wobble on his axis.) Bernal presents the hard surface of self-interest with amazing variety--it's always a good thing when he appears because the movie's mischief level goes way up. It's thus doubly disappointing that Almodóvar's over-complicated storytelling diffuses the jolts Bernal sends through us.