PLOT: Defies description but the story concerns a Spanish filmmaker's effort to resolve how a fictionalized screenplay impacts on his real-life memories of childhood, including a love affair between two boys and child abuse by a priest.
At the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education made its dazzling if disturbing premiere as the opening-night gala, the Spanish filmmaker was asked to explain how much autobiography he let seep into the film.
In typical Almodovar fashion, he called Bad Education (La Mala Educacion) his most personal and most autobiographical film. Then he explained that little of what happens in the story actually happened to him -- so it's not his story.
Almodovar is provocative and playful, and adept at turning what seems like a minor, self-absorbed film into a profound meditation on subjects as diverse as the fragility of memory and the complexity of human sexuality.
Bad Education, which plays here in its original Spanish with English subtitles, refers to Almodovar's profession because one of the central characters is a Spanish filmmaker (played by a dour and determined Fele Martinez, not at all like the flamboyant Almodovar himself).
An actor-writer (Mexican superstar Gael Garcia Bernal in another of his wonderfully rich, multi-layered performances) wanders in with a script about growing up at a Catholic school during the repressive fascist-Franco era in Spain.
The story weaves a tale of two boys who fell in love but were separated by the jealousy of a priest who wanted one of the boys all for himself. The theme of child abuse is introduced, but not in a predictable angel vs. devil fashion. The priest is humanized and complexities explored. It's creepy.
The plot trick in this segment is that the filmmaker assumes that he is one of the boys in the tale -- and the actor played by Bernal claims to be the other boy in the saga.
Trying to explain what happens next would be a fool's game. With the juxtaposition of flashbacks, real or imagined, the making of the film within the film, and the appearance of characters who may or may not be who they claim to be, Bad Education becomes a bad experience for anyone who wants his cinema linear and explainable at all times.
Almodovar is just having too much fun being serious in the film to bother with making it all make sense. The gamesmanship offers the viewer pleasure even when the heavier observations on life are being structured into the piece.
It is little wonder that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a masterpiece of deception, illusion and puzzle-solving, has been frequently mentioned as an inspiration. Almodovar, with his rapturous love of American cinema, certainly knows Vertigo.
But, of course, Almodovar is also himself, and Bad Education is ripe with simulated sex scenes (even in flashback scenes with the boys) and transgressive sexual role-playing (send in the queens). Almodovar never moralizes on sexual behaviour, so don't expect any righteous indignation.
Meanwhile, the film has a shimmering, polished veneer that makes everything we see and think we see seem heightened, surrealistic.
By the end, though, when the puzzle remains unsolved, we tire of Almodovar's antics and the glossiness of the production. But the trip along the way is a mind-blower.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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