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.
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.
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.