Like clockwork, every two years brings a new film by the Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, a darling of critics and arthouse audiences.
Almodovar’s movies all blend together after a while; I couldn’t begin to describe the plots of individual films.
| Almodovar melodrama: A film director re-visits his past, thanks to the sudden re-appearance of a shifty old acquaintance. Pedro Almodovar’s melodrama is a complicated noir with a strong central performance. (In Spanish, with English subtitles.)
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, nudity, subject matter. Now showing: Harvard Exit |
Well, all right, maybe the last one: “Talk to Her” was about men obsessed with women in comas. Hard to forget that twist.
The latest Almodovar is “Bad Education,” and it has his customary ingredients: flamboyant style, throttled passion, complicated plot and a mix-up between art and life on one side, and gay and Catholic sensibilities on the other.
It begins in Madrid in 1980, where a young film director, Enrique (Fele Martinez), receives a surprise visit from an old school friend, Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal). Ignacio, now an actor, has written a memoir of their school days.
Enrique reads the story, and we see it played out. (Or we see his movie of it.) As boys in Catholic school, Enrique and Ignacio were separated when a priest fell in love with Ignacio (the priest sings “Moon River” to the boy during a field trip, and the song takes on sinister connotations).
Back in the present, Enrique agrees to make the story into a film. But the shifty Ignacio, who now wants to be called by his stage name Angel, insists on playing the lead role. Enrique decides to do some investigating into the true story of their past … and the priest, wherever he might be.
Revelations come flying after that. Almodovar has described “Bad Education” as a film of triangles, and it does have a tricky geometric arrangement. It isn’t hard to follow while it’s on, but the combinations are head-spinning if you try to sort them out later.
Although the movie’s in brilliant color, it has the style and spirit of a film noir, a point made explicit by the great music by Alberto Iglesias. It sounds like a pastiche of a Hitchcock score, and it sets the right tone of high melodrama.
Almodovar has long since gone past the campy style of his early movies such as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” This movie has drag queens and raucous sex, but it has a gravity, too, which pays off when the film ponders the character of the priest (played with great complexity in different eras, or versions, by Daniel Gimenez-Cacho and Lluis Homas)
The Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal is very different here than he was playing the central role of Che Guevara in “The Motorcycle Diaries.” He looks physically altered (even when he’s not wearing a dress), and his integrity seems to have rotted away.
“Bad Education” is as confidently made as any Almodovar, and is more compelling than most. I don’t know whether I’ll remember the plot a few years from now, but it was absorbing while it lasted.
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