Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education: Collage - Page 3

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.

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.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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