Bernal plays the tempter whose duplicitous schemes should lead Enrique astray. But Enrique also represents Almodóvar, the man very much in control of this story, and that cools everything down. In fact, Almodóvar seems purposely to keep the fragments from fusing, the better to contemplate them. This makes Bad Education the best-plotted film noir with the least degree of compulsiveness. By contrast, something borderline amateurish like Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) has far more of the nightmarish inevitability, that snapping down of the cookie jar on the protagonist's fingers, that makes film noir almost sickeningly fascinating. (The cookie jar is often between someone else's legs: e.g., Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).)

The single biggest difference between me and other critics is that they think of movies as being about their subjects. With the exception of naturalism (the purest form being documentary) I think it's analytically more precise to think of movies as dramatizing their subjects. That is, movies don't make statements about topics (not even the movies that attempt to) but conform the elements of their subject matter to the mechanics of genre. Thus, it seems totally misplaced, as well as cuckoo, for David Denby in The New Yorker to opine that Bad Education "asks: Is love possible between men, or is it possible only between innocent boys?" Quite apart from how peculiar a question that would be if anyone asked it, this comment tells you that critics not only don't know their field--narrative aesthetics--they don't even know it is their field.

Bad Education doesn't "ask" anything; it tracks the effects of contending vices. The problem is that the movie adopts the perspective of the most detached character. I'm actually glad Almodóvar pulls back from Ignacio's version of the priest's story, which tends toward melodrama. Father Manolo's life after leaving the school (when he's played by Lluís Homar) is more interesting. But I wonder if Almodóvar didn't hesitate to pluck and let resonate the nightmarish strings of the story for fear of losing control of the audience's reactions (and possibly triggering some form of homophobia?).

Father Manolo represents both a sadistic fantasy of the daddy-rapist and then later the masochistic fantasy of the older man being gamed by the amoral, insouciant hottie hustler. As the latter figure he suffers the downtrending results of giving in to temptation that Almodóvar spares Enrique. (Enrique, the Almodóvar figure, outplays Ángel and isn't much older or less attractive; the lithely muscular Martínez as Enrique is plainly a fantasy identification for Almodóvar, though not for us.) Almodóvar has thus divided the film noir protagonist into two characters, the older Father Manolo and Enrique, neither of whom pulls us in.

Finally, we're not expected to indulge any of these fantasies, from either the top's or the bottom's perspective. And Almodóvar seems more comfortable as Enrique piecing the story together with relative impassiveness because it keeps the movie from turning us on. It's hard to make a good film noir if you're uncomfortable with your audience's corruptibility. The true film noir romancer is entirely devoted to dangling temptations in front of us and then hooking us through our lolling, drooling tongues. Making Enrique the dominant figure has the effect on Bad Education that making Edward G. Robinson's incorruptible insurance adjustor the main character would have had on Double Indemnity. With film noir you want to feel sucked into the story.