BAD EDUCATION
Director: Pedro Almodovar
Genre: Spanish Drama
Year: 2004
Watson Scale Rating: 5.5

After locking our bicycles to a post in front of the Mayan Theater, Frosty and I shuffled up to a ponytailed lad in the ticket booth. Offering him a crumpled Jackson, I said, “Two for BAD EDUCATION.” With a sly, teasing grin, the young man fired back a question:  “First, sir – were you born on or before February 5, 1987?” I imagine he was expecting me to give him a nasal snort and a wry smile in appreciation of this sally, but instead I stared at him blankly with my rheumy old eyes. Perhaps I was distracted, lost in anticipation of the buttered popcorn soon to come. Perhaps I had forgotten that BAD EDUCATION is rated NC17. Perhaps my sexagenarian brain had simply shut down. In any case, I didn’t realize at first that he was making a joke about my age. 

The young man panicked and launched into a painfully apologetic explanation of his witticism, an explanation that grew more and more awkward until at last it trailed off into silence. Fumbling, he handed me two tickets, a Lincoln, and a Washington. By now my brain was up and running, and his discomfort was giving me enormous sadistic pleasure. I jammed the long green into the pocket of my sweat pants, held the two tickets up and spread them into a tiny fan, looked at them closely as though appraising a precious jewel, then shifted my gaze back onto the young man’s stricken face. “I understand your jest,” I said in a solemn voice, “and in no way does it offend me. But we have come to your little movie house today to savor the latest creation of the world’s foremost cinematic stylist. The great Pedro Almodovar awaits us. This is no time for jokes.”

Calling Almodovar the world’s foremost cinematic stylist may be a bit of a stretch. He has some stiff competition in that department. Zhang Yimou, Mamoru Oshii, and Quentin Tarantino all come to mind. Still, anyone who’s seen the two dance scenes that open and close TALK TO HER will probably agree that Almodovar’s esthetic sensibilities are hard to top.

In BAD EDUCATION, the opening credits rip across the screen in brilliant colors against a black chalkboard covered with nasty drawings. There is more artistry in these opening credits than you’ll find in the entirety of a typical Hollywood flick. Throughout the film, a vibrant musical score pulsates with vitality. When a young schoolboy sings “Moon River” in a high, sweet voice for the pleasure of a pedophile priest, the effect is simultaneously sickening and exquisite. The camera shots always seem natural, never contrived, but whenever I focused on them closely, I could see how carefully and gorgeously composed they are. And Almodovar’s use of color stuns the eye. When the characters are indoors, the vividness of man’s artifice jumps off the screen in crayon-bright oranges, reds, yellows, and blues, but when the camera shifts to outdoor settings, all those lurid colors fade into dust, and what we see are the etiolated earth tones of nature – washed-out sepias and grays and greens.

“Wait a sec,” you say. “Stop gushing over the esthetics. Cut to the chase and tell us what the story’s all about.” 

Sorry. I refuse to divulge that information. Why should I spoil a movie for you by summarizing what happens in it before you’ve seen it? What I will do is give you a general idea of the type of plot Almodovar has created. The story line of BAD EDUCATION interweaves scenes set in the present with flashbacks, also scenes that are real with scenes that are unreal, including a movie within a movie that we do not realize is a movie until the end of the movie. As a result, the story seems fairly simple and straightforward at first but gradually becomes more and more intricate, tangled, and confusing – just the opposite of most movies. A number of reversals come as genuine surprises and completely confound our understanding of who the characters are and what they’re up to. Guilt and innocence and purity and debasement keep shifting around and jamming into each other until everything is muddled together. In this way Almodovar conveys the complexity of life and the difficulty in distinguishing truth from illusion.  

Incidentally, because the plot involves blackmail and murder, a number of critics have described BAD EDUCATION as a venture into film noir. This description is a specious and misleading oversimplification. Almodovar’s bright colors and playfulness create a mood that’s strikingly different from the brooding darkness and fatality that characterize true film noir.

As always, Almodovar’s subject matter is the kinky complicatedness and infinite variety of sexual love. Because I’m straight, I prefer his films about the kinky complicatedness and infinite variety of heterosexual love, such as TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN and TALK TO HER. Having more or less eradicated my youthful homophobia 40 years ago, I still feel a bit squeamish when sitting in a theater watching gay men do their thing, as is the case in several scenes in BAD EDUCATION. This is not a criticism, mind you, simply an admission that the vestiges of an old prejudice still linger like KKK ghosts in my subconscious. But it’s also a warning. If you’re one of those folks who are totally nauseated whenever they think about a transvestite going at it hot and hard with a man who’s had too much to drink, then BAD EDUCATION ain’t your cup of tea, and you should stay away. On the other hand, if you find such images titillating, you’re in for a double treat – an exceptionally good movie with two or three cheap thrills to boot! 

Almodovar is a magician at coaxing brilliant performances out of actors and actresses whose talent seems pedestrian in other films. In one of the most overpraised films of the year, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, Gael Garcia Bernal’s interpretation of Che Guevara is simplistic, clichéd, and corny, but in BAD EDUCATION, he makes Juan/Angel a completely believable person, richly nuanced and convincing. At least some of the credit for this must be given to Almodovar, who writes his films as well as directing them and knows exactly what he wants out of his cast.

That last paragraph on the acting is kind of slim, isn’t it. Oh well.  It’s 10:30 at night, two hours past my bedtime, and I’m an old man who’s out of gas. But I’ll be back next month with a deep analysis showing that POOH’S HEFFALUMP MOVIE is a symbolic representation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, with Tigger, of course, standing for the Ubermensch.