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.
Article comments
1 - Triniman
Superbly written review, Alan.
2 - Alan Dale
Thank you. I find it tricky to write a review about a movie that's way above average but still doesn't work. At some point I start feeling ridiculously picky, doctrinaire. So I'm doubly glad you enjoyed it.
3 - S
eew, I really don't agree
4 - Leslie Bohn
Alan, your posts are terrific. As usual, you've gotten to the heart of this film's appeal -- and its flaws.
We're never really given the opportunity to wallow in the characters' amorality, like in a really good nihilistic noir. Your great essay puts name to what I felt as I watched, and why i came off entertained and intrigued but unsatisfied.
Can't wait to read your take on Volver, which was also affecting but problematic. Why does its plot seem so perfunctory, when it's really a plot-driven movie after all? I look forward to your take crystallizing my thoughts for me!
5 - Alan Dale
Hey Leslie,
Thanks for the message. I haven't seen Volver yet, but want to, of course. They're rolling it out slowly. I did see Notes on a Scandal, reluctantly, but loved it. Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett finally earn the praise they usually receive no matter what. Working on that right now.