San Pedro's Fault

Fele Martinez, left, and Gael Garcia Bernal in Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education. Courtesy Mongrel Media

Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar loves to barge through the doors of hidden worlds. For 25 years, bullfighters, drag queens, drug addicts, necrophiliacs and pedophilic priests have been caught in Almodovar’s big bear hug. But with his last two films, All About My Mother and Talk To Her, Almodovar stemmed his bull-in-a-china-shop exuberance with breathtaking results. Yes, he still forgave society’s unforgiven, and his worlds continued to pulse with a dizzying, primary palette, but at last, Almodovar’s characters were differentiated from one another. They sang from within the frenzy. He let them breathe.

Bad Education does not stay the breakthrough course. It is, of course, scrupulously constructed, and as beautiful to behold as anything that Almodovar touches, but there’s a sense that some kind of internal, emotional progress has stalled. It’s unfair to speculate as to why a director loses his footing, but let’s: part of the Almodovar thrill ride is knowing as you go that his films veer off to the side of conventional filmmaking; anything could happen. In fact, Law of Desire (which Bad Education most resembles) and Live Flesh were so unique that they seemed entirely beyond genre and above trends, aesthetic or thematic. But in recent years, Almodovar, with his poof of Fraggle hair and Oscar night histrionics, has been embraced as the Euro director of choice; he’s the new model Roberto Benigni, but less grating. Cries of “genius” can handicap any director, and perhaps this is why Bad Education is not as free spirited as what came before. Could Almodovar be feeling constrained by unattainable critical expectations? The film has the stellar craft of late Almodovar, without the fun of early Almodovar.

The obsession at the heart of Bad Education – and there is always an obsession at the heart of Almodovar’s films – spans three decades, beginning in a Catholic boys school in 1964. Eleven-year-olds Enrique and Ignacio are each other’s first, tentative boyfriends. But the film actually starts later, in 1980, when Enrique (Fele Martinez) is a renowned filmmaker in Madrid struggling to find a new movie to make. He cuts up trash tabloids wondering if a film is in the stories, like the one about the woman who hugged the crocodile as it ate her alive. Enrique is saved from that particular bad idea by a knock at the door. After 16 years, Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal) has returned, now a bearded, slightly crass struggling actor looking for work. The visitor comes bearing a story called The Visitor, the tale of the boys’ youthful romance and untimely separation by a jealous priest. Enrique is enthralled; he sees the story as great cinema, and the pedophilic priest – Ignacio’s tortured torturer – as his confused villain.

Gael Garcia Bernal as the femme fatale, Angel. Courtesy Mongrel Media

Too simple, says Almodovar, and the film begins to shape shift, like Ignacio, who asks to be called Angel. Bernal plays several parts, including the film’s necessary femme fatale, Zahara, the blackmailing transsexual heroine of Enrique’s movie. The actor’s body is a little too SpongeBob-shaped to look fantastic in a dress, but those lips are like canoes. He makes a very pretty woman.

Bad Education is a version of film noir, with Enrique as the innocent pulled deeper into an underworld that unlocks his most repressed desires. A pinched, controlled man who seems much older than 27, he doesn’t quite believe that Ignacio is his long lost lover – there’s no physical resemblance, and Ignacio can’t remember any of the songs he sang as the school’s beloved choirboy – but his urges get the better of him. A sultry poolside seduction acts as a casting couch, and Angel gets the lead in the movie.

Time jumps, and we meet another Ignacio (Francisco Boira), a preoperative transsexual with a heroin problem. She’s as lanky and curly-headed as Angel is boxy and feathered, and a classic Almodovar character: loud, messed-up, looking out for number one, and still, somehow, loveable. Soon, the priest (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) returns. Now a wispy-haired old man, he has been defanged. The horrors he committed barely resonate with the strung-out Ignacio, and soon, the user is getting used in surprising, even shocking, ways.

Like Gus Van Sant, Almodovar has limitless affection for his characters; here is a man who asked an audience to empathize with a necrophiliac rapist nurse in Talk to Her – and the audience did. He is an infectious optimist when it comes to society’s outsiders, those who are rarely granted grace, in life or in cinema. And yet, in Bad Education, this grace seems like oversight, as if Almodovar is so distracted keeping all the plots in the air that he’s failed to notice how impossible it is to invest in this priest, or any of the hustlers around him. Even Enrique is a smug, unflattering portrait of the director as narcissist. The long ago tragedy that animates everyone’s motivations never comes to life. Perhaps the corruptions of the Catholic church are just too recent and too real, but when this aged priest sits in casual proximity to his child victim, now grown, it seems not audacious, but ridiculous. Why would Ignacio not buck up against the man who ruined her life?

Instead, it is left to the filmmaker, Enrique, to redeem Ignacio, but even he can’t do it. His movie is as dark and pitiless as Almodovar’s; yet another unstable story. Though the acting in Bad Education is fine – Bernal manages the shifts seamlessly – none of the characters ever look one another in the eye. For melodrama, the film is alarmingly coy, and sometimes even dull. It is as if Almodovar is pushing away the audience, the hungry crocodiles eager to consume his genius. But his artfulness, so impressive, is not enough; we want his heart.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.