La Mala educación (2004)

La Mala educación is a Spanish thriller film first released in 2004, directed by Pedro Almodóvar.  The film stars Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lluís Homar and Francisco Maestre.  It has also been released under the title: Bad Education.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Enrique Goded is a Spanish filmmaker who, lacking inspiration, has resorted to scouring newspapers to find an idea for his next film.  Whilst engaged in this fruitless task, he is visited by a young man who claims to be his childhood friend Ignacio but who insists on being called Ángel.  The latter, an aspiring actor, brings with him a novel which he hopes Enrique will make into a film, with him playing the lead role.  The novel recounts Enrique and Ignacio’s traumatic experiences at a Catholic boys’ school in the 1960s.  There, the prepubescent Ignacio allowed himself to be raped by his teacher, Father Manolo, to prevent the latter from expelling Enrique, with whom he had fallen in love.  Enrique was expelled anyway, and for the past fifteen years Ignacio has been pining for revenge against the man who corrupted and abused him.   The novel ends with Ignacio, now a transvestite, returning to his former school to blackmail  Father Manolo.  Suspicious that Ángel is not who he claims to be, Enrique pays a call on Ignacio’s mother and learns that Ignacio died four years ago.  It transpires that Ángel is in fact his younger brother, Juan.  Curious to discover what Ángel is after, Enrique agrees to make the film with Ángel playing the lead.   However, he changes the ending, so that Ignacio is murdered by the Catholic priests he is trying to blackmail.  From Ángel’s reaction to this and an unexpected confrontation with the man who was once Father Manolo, Enrique learns the truth about his former friend’s tragic end...

Pedro Almodóvar’s dark tale of corruption, deceit and revenge clearly owes a great deal to Alfred Hitchcock, not only in its subject matter (a typical Hitchcockian melange of murder, mystery and deadly double dealings), but also in the stylishly expressionistic mise-en-scène and a score that could easily have been written by Bernard Herrmann.  But, as any Almodóvar aficionado will testify, there is far more beneath the surface than is first apparent, and the Hitchcockian motifs are little more than window dressing to what is fundamentally a dark exploration of identity and self-expression through art.   

La Mala educación (a.k.a. Bad Education) is, in many ways, the bleakest of Almodóvar’s films to date.  It lacks the reassuring humour and frivolous optimism of what has gone before and has a distinct feel of a film noir take on a Greek tragedy, albeit with the usual hint of wry Sirkian melodrama.  If the film has a fault, it is that Almodóvar seems strangely reluctant to draw too deeply from the well of his inner feelings.  There is a sense that what he is showing us is a carefully self-censored expression of his own personal reality – the shadow, not the substance, of the man’s inner torment.  The increasing prevalence of male characters in Almodóvar’s recent films suggests that, possibly, the director is beginning to open up and reveal much more about himself. Bad Education offers a tantalising glimpse of this in the exquisitely poetic Moon River sequence, but it is apparent that Almodóvar has much more to say about himself.

Technically, Bad Education is almost flawless, one of Almodóvar’s best films to date.  The imaginative camerawork exteriorises the dark inner world of the main protagonists, subtly exposing the dangerous desires and impulses that lurk with a  Jaws-like menace just beneath the surface.  Through the effective use of flashbacks and fictionalised flash-forwards, past, present and future become intermeshed into a single, unsettling reality that forms a compelling narrative.  We are reminded that we can never escape from our past experiences – a depressing thought if that past involves being the victim of child abuse.  The performances are as impressive as in any previous Almodóvar film, with a particularly noteworthy turn from Gael García Bernal, who makes the switch from the cute, sexually ambiguous college boy Ángel to the vindictive transvestite Zahara with disturbing ease.

Bad Education is thematically similar to Almodóvar’s previous Law of Desire, (1987)  but stylistically could hardly be more different.  Watching the two films back-to-back, it is striking how far the former enfant terrible of Spanish cinema has come in less than two decades.  Whilst some may lament the passing of the wild and woolly rebel with a taste for flamboyant excess, others will celebrate the fact that Pedro Almodóvar has become a master of his art, consistently delivering thought-provoking, seductively stylish and highly original films, crafted with the skill and passion of a true auteur.  Long may he continue.

© James Travers 2009

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