January 20-26, 2005

movies

Past Imperfect

dream girl: Gael García Bernal as Bad Education's Zahara.

The past is not dead, or even past, in Bad Education.

by Sam Adams

Pedro Almodívar's Bad Education opens, appropriately enough, with a pop-art collage: a title sequence in which overlapped layers of brightly colored newsprint peel back to reveal more layers, and beneath them, still more. Although it's set a quarter-century in the past, the movie's story of a young man coming to terms with his molestation by a Catholic priest is alarmingly topical, perhaps even more so in the U.S. than in Almodívar's native Spain. But as Bad Education reminds us before an actor even appears on screen, you can't rip a story from the headlines without tearing something in two.

When we first see Enrique Goded (Fele Mart'nez), he's sorting through newspaper clippings, looking for an idea for his next movie. Almodívar knows that a character with artistic leanings will automatically be read as a stand-in for the director, and rather than downplaying the resemblance, he encourages it. Enrique's office is painted in broad, bright swaths that recall Almodívar's eye-popping palettes, and the boldly graphic, self-consciously kitschy posters for Enrique's previous films invoke Almodívar's early cubist Looney Tunes. But if you think Bad Education can be explained by equating one filmmaker with another, well, you haven't met Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael Garc'a Bernal).

When his old classmate and boyhood lover walks into his office, Enrique doesn't recognize Ignacio, who's now an aspiring actor under the name Angel Andrade. But when Ignacio hands him a short story he's written called "The Visit," the memories come flooding back, although "memories" is far too simple a term. The main character in Ignacio's story is a vampy transsexual dancer/prostitute named Zahara ("a combination of desert, hazard and cafeteria"), whom Bernal plays with just a touch of awkwardness, like an actor trying a role on for size. Naturally, when Enrique agrees to make the movie, Ignacio — sorry, Angel — insists he's the only one who can play the part, which seems only fair since we've already seen him do it.

Zahara's own journey into the past is sparked when she rips off a customer's wallet and realizes she's been unsuccessfully trying to blow a former childhood crush. (The shot of Bernal trying to rouse his drunken trick to attention is the most gratifyingly tasteless thing Almodívar has shot in years.) Memory lane quickly leads Zahara to Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the priest whom she promptly accuses of molesting her when she was a boy. The fact that there's no way to describe Bad Education's plot without using phrases like "when she was a boy" is indicative of the way the movie's characters fall outside the traditional boundaries of written language, and the movie makes an implicit argument that the same goes for the language of film. In the movie's first half, Almodívar shifts restlessly between "The Visit" — presented in a frame within Bad Education's frame — and the movie's main story, and then daringly abandons the metafictional pretense to focus on more salient questions of truth and falsehood. Characters turn out to have multiple identities which collide and overlap; actors play more than one character, and the same character may be played by more than one actor, sometimes simultaneously. Astonishingly, Almodívar finds a naturalistic context for all this identity-swapping, which means that although the movie is nigh-impossible to summarize, it's never difficult to follow.

"One part is based on my childhood, and the other isn't," Ignacio tells Enrique as he hands over the manuscript of "The Visit." There's no way to say which part is which, nor does answering that question interest Almodívar much. Zahara is as much a real character as Ignacio is, an equation whose import only becomes clear as Bad Education enters its final act. By then, Zahara's blackmail plot has crossed over into the real world; as Ignacio and his new lover leave a film noir festival, one remarks, "It's as if all the films are about us." It's not easy to imagine a version of Double Indemnity with transsexual prostitutes and pedophile priests, but then, you don't have to: Pedro Almodívar's already done so.

In contrast to a tough-guy noir, though, Bad Education doesn't pretend to walk down every mean street. When it comes time for what would ordinarily be the movie's climactic flashback, Almodívar literally tears the image in two rather than depict a young boy's violation. The gesture of self-conscious circumspection rings a bit hollow, especially since Almodívar has already placed the act well out of sight. No one would expect Almodívar to recreate such a horrific event, but the intrusion of such a coy device is almost fatally disruptive. (It doesn't work in Persona, either.) It's not enough for Almodívar not to show the movie's ultimate evil; he has to show he's not showing it. That might be one layer too many.

Bad Education Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended