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Daily Archive > Weekend Read > Bad Education
Almodovar Schools
by yon motskin
With his magnificent melodramas, singular Spanish style, and peppery pompadour, Pedro Almodovar, one of world cinema's most original and recognizable auteurs, is back with his stunning, new, complex film- noir cabaret -- and his best film to date. In this tragic story, we follow the lives of three people over three time periods told in three different ways, with actors playing multiple characters, via a non-linear structure that contains flashbacks, multiple narrators, and even two instances of a story-within-a-story mirroring the main narrative -- and it all works wonderfully.
Bad Education
Pedro Almodovar
The first narrative takes place in 1980 and follows young director Enrique (Fele Martinez) who, while looking for his next film, meets a supposed former Catholic school friend, Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), with his story to adapt called The Visit. The second narrative dramatizes The Visit in 1964, where the two schoolmates fall in love with cinema and each other, only to be separated by abusive priest Father Manolo. The third narrative recounts 1977 and ties all the events together by revealing a stage of secrets: Enrique's film, Ignacio's true identity, the priest's motives, and a hard-boiled plot more twisty than a Raymond Chandler thread.
Bad Education's labyrinthine plot may seem confusing, but once you see the film, it makes perfect, if not poetic, sense. "The film tells three stories, about three concentric triangles, which, in the end, turn out to be just one story," Almodovar says. "It's like a triangle that becomes another triangle and another triangle in the future. It's like a triangle that becomes a vicious circle."
 Theme- and tone-wise, Bad Education is Almodovar's most mature work, much more so like his last two films -- All About My Mother and Talk to Her -- than his dozen previous ones. It also sees the filmmaker -- who has written all his films -- at the height of his sensual storytelling powers. The complex (and personal) narrative parallels the complex inner lives of the protagonists. There are heartbreaking musical sequences and imaginative combinations of sight and sound unparalleled in current films.
It took Almodovar over ten years and ten drafts to get the story straight, and it wasn't until he reached the end that Almodovar made an important discovery that elevates this story from just another song-and-dance to the pantheon of great hybrid films that reinvent a genre -- like Sunset Boulevard, All That Jazz, and Unforgiven -- in this case, film noir. Replete with femme fatales, blackmail, and murder, Almodovar puts his own spin on the hard-boiled genre. It's a mystery, it's a drama, it's a love story, it's deceitful. Almodovar echoes The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But throw out tradition -- this is transgressive film noir. This is sing- your-heart-out, screw-his-brains-out film noir, full of transvestites, feathered boas, homoerotic priests, and falsetto-pitched choir boys.
As a lush and time-spanning dramatic love story, it's heartbreaking. But layer on film noir and Bad Education is not only Almodovar's most sophisticated, but maybe the best film of the year.
 Bad Education
Sony Pictures Classics
Not rated; 105 min.
Buy tickets now
Buy the poster
Writer-director Yon Motskin is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Film Program. He is currently preparing to shoot his first feature film, Cutman, based on his award-winning short that premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and screened worldwide.
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