La Mala Educación (Bad Education) is the first film by Spain’s flamboyant, prolific Pedro Almodóvar that I like. It isn’t a great work, certainly, but it isn’t, either, an exercise in bugged-out style. It’s purposeful and, for the most part, coherent; unlike past Almodóvars, it isn’t swamped in sentimental soap opera or lurid melodrama. However unaccustomed he may be to it, Almodóvar wears tact and restraint well. With this film, he functions as more than a nimbler version of Douglas Sirk.
Bad Education is about fascism’s ghosts—the legacy of Franco’s long, oppressive, repressive Spanish rule. It takes us back to a time when in the 1970s outstanding Italian filmmakers sifted through such ghosts in the birthplace of Fascism: Bernardo Bertolucci, in The Conformist (1970); Marco Bellocchio, in In the Name of the Father (1971); although his film is more derivative, Federico Fellini, in Amarcord (1974). Bad Education reminds us afresh what a terrifying and inhuman thing fascism is.
For this occasion, Almodóvar has concocted an overelaborated script, with stories inside stories, and infused the proceedings with an irrelevant dose of film noir. Asking Almodóvar not to be self-indulgent or cinematically referential may be asking for the moon. Most commentators have noted numerous borrowings from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and, while I admit to having missed all these, I think that this particular field has been turned over by filmmakers enough. Bad Education has its annoying aspects. But it is personal and passionate, and bleedingly honest in assessing the kind of damage that even the residue of fascism inflicts on people. This once, Almodóvar has made a credible and somewhat substantial film.
The story takes place in 1980 and a few years before that (post-Franco), and in the Franco-era 1960s, when Enrique and Ignacio, two of the main characters, were schoolboys. I appreciate the oddness of my account thus far, with its backward chronology; but this is the way of the film as it penetrates the past in order to clarify the “current” state of certain lives. One of the reasons, I feel, that even the present in this film is a quarter-century back in time is that Almodóvar wants us to see that the past is everything, that everything is infused by it, and a good many things are determined by it. Ignacio’s eventual drug addiction symbolizes fascism’s hangover—the damage that the experience of fascism continually visits on human lives.
Enrique Goded has grown up to be a successful film director. Openly gay, perhaps he suggests Almodóvar himself. He is a fictional character, of course, but Almodóvar feels more than a little implicated in the fiction. Ducking the watchful eyes of the priests running the school, Enrique and Ignacio fell innocently in love with one another as children. Now, one day, an ambitious stage actor visits Enrique in his office, armed with a script he claims to have written, and tells Enrique that he is Ignacio. They haven’t seen each other in sixteen years, since the day that Enrique was taken out of school by his parents, and he looks like Ignacio. But in time Enrique will begin to question this person’s identity. Meanwhile, “Ignacio” asks to be called by his professional name, Angel.
Enrique loves Angel’s script. Its title, The Visit, with its winking allusion to Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s tragicomic The Visit of the Old Woman, suggests that it is about past sexual abuse. Indeed, the autobiographical script recalls the sexual abuse that a pedophiliac priest, Father Manolo, routinely visited upon Ignacio. Enrique changes the script’s hopeful ending by having Father Manolo and an accomplice murder Ignacio when the grown Ignacio, in his transvestite incarnation, Zahara, revisits the school in order to blackmail the priest. The two killers will get rid of the body, and then no one will see what they have done. “God sees,” the accomplice reminds Father Manolo. The priest counters, “But God is on our side.” After all, Father Manolo is the self-styled “gardener of young souls.”
There has been a spate of anti-Catholic movies in recent years about pedophiliac priests. But this one is remarkably different insofar as it departs from literalism and drifts steadily into metaphor. Almodóvar uses the sexual abuse as a means of portraying fascism, in particular, the intense fear and lack of self-determination that the inhabitants of a fascist state feel. In fact, the entire school, with its militaristic regimen, evokes fascism. There is a wonderful distant overhead shot in which a field of boys are performing synchronized morning calisthenics. It’s gym class. The children are down on the ground, and the space above them—heaven, if you will—appears to be pressuring the whole lot of these individuals into conformity. When, before, has Almodóvar given us such a resonant and thematically radiant shot?
But there is something else about all this that I find peculiarly edifying: the contrast Almodóvar is able to draw between the priest’s cunning, manipulative pedophilia and Ignacio and Enrique’s homoerotic love for one another. There are those among us who have a hard time distinguishing between homosexuality and male-male pedophilia. They will have a much easier time doing so after seeing this film.
Best of all, however, is the interpenetration of fascism and Roman Catholicism that Almodóvar is able to portray. I know of no other film that makes clearer the bold suggestion that fascism is molded on the hierarchic, authoritative Church, that fascism is the political correlative to Roman Catholicism. I don’t know whether I accept this. I probably don’t. I only know that this idea and its compelling presentation give Bad Education a daring nothing else by Almodóvar has remotely approached. One feels that the filmmaker isn’t toying with us here, isn’t playing clever games, but is drawing this connection between fascism and Roman Catholicism from the bowels of his personal experience with both. For the first time, Almodóvar is functioning as an artist rather than as an entertainer, and nowhere more so than in the haunting, heartbreaking scene where Ignacio is compelled to sing “Moon River” to the priest’s guitar accompaniment—foreplay, it turns out, for the finale the priest has in mind. Almodóvar has provided gorgeous aesthetics before; but, here, he marshals devastating irony as well. For the tremulous purity of the child’s voice, matched by the overpowering physical beauty of the countryside in which the scene plays out, powerfully conveys, by way of contrast, a sense of priestly meanness, control, corruption, self-delusion and rationalization. Add to all this one thing more: Almodóvar also paints the priest generously and sympathetically. We see him a little like the serial child rapist and killer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), as someone in the grip of a terrible compulsion he cannot control. All the more, this approach shifts our attention away from the peculiarities of an individual, Father Manolo, to the repressive structure of the Church. When has Almodóvar been this complex, this grown up?
How agreeable, too, is the fact that Almodóvar provides an alternative to the top-down victimization of children as metaphor for the fate of inhabitants of a fascist state. Pointedly, it occurs in the post-Franco part of the film. (Actually, the film zigs and zags between past and present.) During the shoot of the film-with-in-the-film, that is to say, Enrique’s film based on Ignacio’s script, we are given a lateral shot that shows the crew, helmed by the director, pulling together as the scene is filmed. The actors who are playing the scene in the film-within-the-film, although spatially divided from those involved in the shooting of the scene, are, of course, part of the same group effort: people working together, helping each other, toward a common goal. There is nothing so moving as this in, say, François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973); here, the film-within-the-film contributes thematically, is given political context, resonates.
Part of the fun of Bad Education is keeping its imaginary projections—we “see” the actions indicated in Ignacio’s script as Enrique reads it—and its representations of reality straight. The film is dizzying at times. The confusion, though, is correlative to the mystery cloaking Angel’s identity. It turns out that Angel isn’t Ignacio after all but, instead, his younger brother, Juan, who, along with Father Manolo, murdered Ignacio, explaining to Enrique, “You don’t know what it’s like having a brother like that, living in a small town.” Ignacio was homosexual, and he developed women’s breasts as a result of hormone therapy in preparation for a sex-change operation. For the sake of his career, Juan beds with guys also, but his heart, if he has one, isn’t in it. Or perhaps he is in denial of his own sexuality. About “Ignacio”/Angel/Juan, one cannot be sure of much, so slippery, chameleon-like and apparently cold-blooded is he. But this much is certain: the performance that diminutive Gael García Bernal gives is amazing, including, in drag, as Zahara. Excellent, too, is Daniel Giménez Cacho as Father Manolo.
You don’t know what it’s like having a brother like that, living in a small town. Fascism reduces humanity to the parochial. No one should have to live in that particular small town.
