Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004)
Almodóvar's latest, "La Mala Educacion," is an homage to Hitchcock and film noir, with only a thin layer of Almodóvar's brushstrokes overtop. The fact that this film is an homage is no secret, from the "Psycho"-esque title sequence with unsettling violins to the fact that the two villains pass time by going to a film noir film festival. The story is still uniquely Almodóvar as the perverse characters and left field sexual scenarios are an integral part of the storyline, but the cons the story is built around are as old as cinema (or perhaps as old as storytelling itself).
There are three stories in the film. The first is a story of a young director, Enrique, who is reunited with a longlost friend from school, Ignacio, who presents him with a script about their time in Catholic school and the priest who abused Ignacio. The second story is the script itself which flashes back to the time of the abuse as the two boys discover their sexuality and Ignacio is scarred by the priest. The script culminates with Ignacio returning to his school, now a preop transexual who has written a story about the abuse, to extort the priest under the threat that he will publish the story. After the flashback ends, the priest confronts the director Enrique and tells him the true story of Ignacio, leading to several plot twists in true film noir fashion.
While the deftly intertwined stories make for a captivating movie, "Bad Education" shouldn't rank among Almodóvar's best works. One of the indelible marks of Almodóvar's works is his ability to make you feel sympathy and compassion for the most deviant. In "Talk to Her," we feel for the nurse, Benigno, despite the fact that he rapes his comatose patient, Alicia. In "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!," the audience finds itself almost hoping that Ricky and Marina fall in love, despite the fact that Ricky was just released from a mental hopsital and has hunt down Marina, his favorite porn star. However, in "Bad Education," we do not feel for these deviant characters who dominate the screen time. The priest is beyond reproach. He is driven only by his desires; he has destroyed his life as well as Ignacio's, and you feel his sad outcome is perhaps too kind. The antihero of the movie, Ignacio's brother Juan, is also not sympathetic. An undercurrent to the movie is Almodóvar's hatred of actors ("there's nothing less sexy than an actor begging for work"), and Juan seems to embody all this distastefulness. His one goal is the acting job and stardom; beyond being an object of desire, he has no redeeming qualities.
While the movie very directly takes on the church for its history of abuse, interestingly enough that's not the feeling you leave the theater with. You aren't left with hatred for the system but instead feel sorry on a more personal level for the tragic figure of Ignacio, further destroyed by drugs, both nihilistic and helplessly clinging to lost causes.
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