“Bad Education” is alternately forceful and meandering, and ultimately heartbreaking. Taking an uneven stab at film noir, the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar — whose work is usually much more florid — indulges cross-dressing fetishes, maligns child-molesting priests and celebrates French New Wave cinema. Yes, folks, the holiday movie season has officially arrived. By ordinary (not Almodovar) standards, “Bad Education” is provocative. Yet it lacks the sense of daring, coherent vision and subversive wit that is so prominent in the Spanish auteur’s best work. However one judges the creative merits of the film, one thing’s for sure: Almodovar’s subject matter here is sure to stir things up in America, arriving as it does in the wake of widespread revelations of sexual abuse by clergymen. Too bad it seems as though he’s content to simply shock, rather than engage, his audience. Even worse, despite his claims to the contrary, it feels like Alomodovar is using this semi-autobiographical piece to settle scores with the priests who educated him.
It’s 1980 in Madrid, and Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) is a twenty-something filmmaker of some merit. One day a stranger arrives at Enrique’s office claiming to be his boyhood love, Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael Garcia Bernal). Ignacio gives Enrique a story he’s written called “The Visit,” which graphically recounts his schoolboy sexual encounters and the horrors visited upon him by a predator named Father Manolo. Cue flashback. The story also delves into the misadventures of Ignacio’s adult alter ego, Zahara, a drug addict transvestite who impersonates Sara Montiel (a sort of Spanish Mae West gay icon of the ’60s and ’70s). Bernal, delivering a fine performance, is a dead ringer for Julia Roberts in drag. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 19, 2004. Read the original PDF.