Movie Gazette

Madrid, 1980. Director Enrique (Fele ‘Lovers of the Arctic Circle’ Martínez) is intrigued by a surprise visit from a young actor (Gael ‘Amores Perros’ García Bernal) with a manuscript entitled ‘The Visit’. The man claims to be his boyhood sweetheart Ignacio, and the manuscript, which he says is part truth, part fiction, documents the abuse Ignacio suffered at school in the 1960s at the hands of Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho), and describes how in 1977 he paid a visit to the priest and blackmailed him with a threat to publish a semi-autobiographical story entitled ‘The Visit’. The predatory Enrique agrees to make the story into a film (albeit with a changed ending) and to let the actor, in exchange for sexual favours, play the transvestite Ignacio – but a visit which Enrique pays to Ignacio’s mother, and another which he receives from the real Father Manolo (Lluís Homar), only adds to his suspicions that all is not what it seems.

‘Bad Education’ is an erotically charged puzzle. Enrique and Ignacio’s brief school romance and tragic separation, and the gaudy melodrama of the later episodes, keeps the viewer engaged, while the convoluted layering of films within films and flashbacks within flashbacks creates an intellectual challenge for any viewer trying to get a grip on what the film is about. Ignacio’s story is manipulated and distorted by everyone to their own ends, ranging from Ignacio right through to the film’s director Pedro Almodóvar himself – who also, like Enrique, directed his first feature film in 1980, and who himself wrote (but never published) a short story called ‘The Visit’. Each main character has his own reason for wanting this story either told or suppressed, and each reason becomes clear by the end of the film – but it remains a mystery whether Almodóvar’s own motive for telling the tale is revenge, blackmail, the exorcising of personal ghosts, pure art, or some combination of these.

Although this film is Almodóvar’s fifteenth, it is his first to address, however obliquely, the Franco era and the lasting effects it had on the lives of those who were brought up in it. The stolen passions and emotional blackmail which dominate this film all have their template in the ‘bad education’ which Enrique and Ignacio received at their Franco-era Catholic boarding school. Yet our view of this is obscured by the film’s kaleidoscopic structure. When the young schoolboys are seen swimming or exercising, the camera lingers voyeuristically over their half-naked bodies – but it is unclear whether this reflects a fascist ideal of masculinity, the salacious perspective of the priests, or a reflection of the homoerotic longings of Ignacio (as writer) or Enrique (as reader). Even the paedophile priest proves a chimerical figure: in Enrique’s revised cinematic script with its changed ending, Manolo is portrayed tabloid-style as an evil monster, but Manolo is by his own account someone altogether more pathetic, and far less in control of others than they are of him.

At the end of ‘Bad Education’, much prominence is given to the word ‘passion’. No matter how deeply personal a statement the film may be for Almodóvar, it is difficult to uncover much emotional depth here beneath all the layers of deceit, disguise, manipulation and shifting identity – but perhaps Almodóvar, with his bitter portrayal of the scars left by a Catholic upbringing, has a different kind of ‘passion’ in mind, making this film a blistering rejoinder to Mel Gibson’s own The Passion of the Christ;.