Last year François Ozon's Swimming Pool managed to put an emotionally detached writer figure at the center of a black little crime story and still be totally absorbing. In Swimming Pool reality, fantasy, and fiction likewise converge in the wake of the bad end of a relationship, but it's a much better marriage of perspectives inside and outside the plot. We see the story from the point-of-view of the novelist played by Charlotte Rampling, who manages to maintain control and come out on top, but we also see her objectively for what she is. And unlike Almodóvar's Enrique she has her vices, as a woman and as a writer, to go alongside those of the amoral girl she's spying on and writing into her new novel. In Bad Education Enrique is just the collage artist, and his sexual exploitation of "Ignacio" isn't even treated as a vice but as something more along the lines of research. Bad Education is never as involving as Swimming Pool--there's too much of the Almodóvar figure and at the same time too little of Almodóvar the free-associative artist.

Bad Education isn't insipid the way Almodóvar's All About My Mother was, attempting too hard to make happy elective families out of drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes, and the HIV infected. Talk to Her was a lot better, in no small part because the compulsive sexual malfeasance was at the heart of the movie, unlike Father Manolo's in Bad Education. (Priests molesting altar boys may be scissored from the news like the dead motorcyclist and the suicide-by-crocodiles that intrigue Enrique but it's a fairly arbitrary aspect of the movie.) Though it's been shot, edited, and released, to overwhelmingly positive reviews, Bad Education is still no more than a great idea for a movie.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.