Truth upon crushing truth
Bad Education, dir. Pedro Almodovar.
Almodovar’s narrative themes through a female perspective tend to inhabit a more optimistic, if chaotic, universe. However, he deals almost exclusively with male/male relationships in this movie. Bad Education’s dark world is one of cruel exchanges subject to immutable laws—money and advancement for youthful flesh. Love here is just a narcissistic projection, a delirium in which only the powerful can afford to indulge.
Ignacio, a sensitive, talented ten-year-old, is a boarder at a Catholic school in the Spain of the 1950s. Father Manolo, his literature teacher, fawns on him and then sexually abuses him. Twenty years later, Ignacio is a heroin-addicted drag queen on the skids who decides to blackmail Manolo (who certainly ‘owes him’). His plans to make Manolo pay for his cosmetic surgery seem as pathetic and hopeless as his dreams of getting clean. Yet the story he writes wields the power to set the wheels of fate (and the plot) turning. It is titled The Visit because it has a fantasy dénouement of the adult Ignacio visiting the priest and confronting him. Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros) has depth and range as Juan, Ignacio’s beautiful younger brother who steals his story and identity in order to scam successful young film director Enrique into making it into a movie.
Enrique, who was Ignacio’s best friend (and first crush) at school, cynically allows himself to be snowed into casting Juan in the starring role as Ignacio. He soon sees though Juan’s lies but is curious, and he desires Juan enough to let him move in with him. Enrique can also drive a hard bargain. On yet another level, Enrique is very much Almodovar’s alter ego, lampooning his own early directorial attempts.
The Visit (the film-within-the-film) is a surreal high-camp pastiche with ‘bells and smells’ ecclesiastical stylings very reminiscent of Pierre and Gilles’s homoerotic religious imagery. Almodovar’s treatment of clerical child sex abuse seems reduced to a lubricious farce at times (though certainly not at others) and makes very uncomfortable watching. It would be easy to hate Bad Education for this alone, but it defies a simple analysis (or even a complex one) because nothing is ever quite what it seems to be. Each character’s story extinguishes the truth of someone else’s. It’s equally valid to interpret aspects of The Visit as a romanticised backstory; wilful self-deceit; the inability of experience