Bad Education
Almadovar blends noirish mystery with the mystery of the creative process

About halfway through Pedro Almadovar's "Bad Education" the virtuosity of Almadovar's craft really struck home with me. I can't remember exactly which scene it was where this hit me; in fact, I think it was a scene where not much was really going on, drama-wise. I think that is what caught my eye; so many directors are so busy trying to show off their bravura technique that they forget that sometimes the film just needs to catch its breath and relax into itself.

Almadovar's film was like that; he pulls off some very technically challenging stunts in "Bad Education" but they are likely to go by unnoticed until you think about the way he did it.

From its very outset, "Bad Education" displays a very different sensibility from a Hollywood film; it begins with that most dreaded of all scenarios, the director (or writer) or, here, the most hideously pretentious of all, the writer/director who is swamped for an idea. Usually, nothing gets me more impatient and twitchy faster than the sight of such a person in a movie mooning around as if the world will cease functioning unless they "get an idea."

A Hollywood movie might have spent the entire running time revolving around the getting an idea movie. "Bad Education" impressed me right away with the alacrity with which it dispensed with the cliche while deepening it and expanding it. Before I realized it, I was suddenly watching a movie about the formation of a movie idea, and also the movie that the idea might become, and also how memories and the uncovering of new information alter the creative process into some new, unsuspected hybrid that even the work's creator didn't fully understand until he started taking it apart and putting it back together again.

I'm positive that the above paragraph is not a very good explanation, but it might be the best I can do. More specifically, Almadovar quickly sets up and juggles at least three, perhaps four, levels of reality working with very subtle distinctions. There is the writer/director's experience of working on a new film, there is the vision inspired by a script given to him by an old friend from his early school days, and also his own memories of those school days which may or may not differ from his own perceptions. As the film progresses, the image and meaning we take away from each of those levels changes as we are given new information, which invariably makes us rethink what has passed before.

All this might make the movie seem more like a puzzle box than it actually is; at its heart, the film is moving story about human lives, wasted possibilities, and the dark mystery that lives at the core of what makes people behave the way that they do.

The film opens with a title sequence that might have been designed by Saul Bass, a la Alfred Hitchcock, with dark, film-noir music that borrows from Bernard Herrmann's playbook. Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez), the writer/director, is reading tabloids, hoping to find an idea for his next movie, when a person shows up claiming to be his friend Ignacio from their long past school days. Ignacio, who now wants to be called Angel, gives Enrique a script which is about those school days, darkened by pedophile priest, and a later attempt by one of the boys, now a grown up transvestite hustler, to blackmail the priest.

I've already talked about the varying levels of reality, and I'm not sure how much more of the plot I care to discuss for fear of giving something away. Suffice it to say that as the title sequence suggests, the film is film-noir (though perhaps the most brightly photographed noir ever shot) and everything and everyone is not what or who they might at first seem.

Much has been made of the pedophile priest elements of the story, but the film eschews such cliched explanations for the action that follows. Enrique, in adapting the script to the screen, transforms the priests into far worse villains than they are in Ignacio's original script, and Ignacio was the person most harmed by those events. And when the offending priest, Fr. Manalo (played in his older incarnation by Lluis Homar) appears later in the movie, he is revealed to be not necessarily evil, but a heartbreakingly weak and flawed human being. Nor do the actions of Fr. Manalo do anything to explain the conduct of the character who turns out to be the most cold-hearted, calculating person in the film.

The film rides on the performance — or, more accurately, the performances — of Gael Garcia Bernal, who portrays Ignacio/Angel, the script's fictionalized version of Ignacio, Zahara (a female impersonator/cabaret singer) and a another character, Juan. It's a marvelously controlled and nuanced performance, with Bernal having to present several faces of essentially the same person to fulfill the needs of the script; as the perceptions and realities of the viewer change, so does the aspect of Bernal's character change. Compare this with his turn as Che Guevara in "The Motorcycle Diaries" and Bernal is revealed as an actor of enormous range and talent.