the dizzying past
by
Douglas Messerli
Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay and director) La mala educación (Bad Education) / 2004
There
is but a few sexual differences left out (except those involving women) of Pedro Almodovars’s
2004 film, La mala education (Bad Education),
which includes gay, drag, transvestite, transsexual relationships, pederasty by
a priest and principal at the Catholic school of which the movie’s title hints,
and later child abuse of the brother of the child the priest lusted for. Besides
all that, the director includes themes concerning drugs, robbery, defamation of
religious relics, bribery, and two murders. This is clearly not a comforting in
world into which you, if tortured by things out of ordinary, might want to curl
up.
What starts out as an innocent love
between the two schoolboys, Ignacio (Nacho Pérez), a beautiful young choir boy,
and Enrique (Raúl García Forneiro) quickly shifts into a deep tale of lust and
revenge. The two boys, like many adolescent males, fall in love, grope each
other in a movie theater, and attempt to meet up again in the middle of the
night in the school’s bathroom, where they caught by the head principal Father
Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). The loyal Ignacio even offers his body up to the
priest, in a kind of odd spin of the Eucharist, if only Enrique is not
punished; the offer is accepted but Ignacio’s dear friend is still expelled. As
the later transvestite Ignacio says, "I sold myself for the first time
that night in the sacristy.”
From that terrible event, the movie spins
out a series of events wherein nearly everyone except Enrique shift names and
sexual identities almost simultaneously. The lovely child Ignacio becomes a transvestite
whore, Zahara (one of three roles Gael García Bernal plays in this work), who along with her friend Paca
(Javier Cámara) evidently steals her customers’ keys, money, and cars in turn
for a few moments of sexual pleasure.
Almodóvar never quite explains why the
abused Ignacio has become a “fag” drag queen seeking to become a transsexual.
This director rarely explains why his impassioned characters have chosen the
lives which they live. Rather they shift in and out of the realities the films
within a film reveal to us; or, for that matter, refuse to reveal to us.
While Paca steals the expensive church
relics, Zahara confronts the Padre about their past, threatening to publish a
story she has written—like Almodóvar, she is also a writer—if he does not pay
her a million pesetas—a lot of money in the Franco days, which this film
stealthfully references.
Fast forward to a moment when Ignacio
visits the now successful filmmaker Enrique—who at the moment, reminding us of Almodóvar’s
most recent film, Pain and Glory, is currently suffering a kind of creative
hiatus—reintroducing himself as Ignacio (again Gael García Bernal), but who now
calls himself Angel Andrade (a much better name proclaims
the young would-be actor), has brought the story of “The Visit” to his former
adolescent lover.
The director is intrigued, particularly
when he recognizes the story which this older Ignacio has given him is the tale
of their childhood love. Although Enrique is perfectly willing to cast the
handsome young actor in the role of Ignacio, he also senses that there is
something wrong with “the picture,” particularly when the now muscular Ignacio
wants also to play the role of the drag-queen Zahara. He is intrigued enough,
however, to take on this Ignacio has his lover, but confused enough to visit the
boy’s mother in Galicia, who informs him that Ignacio has been dead for four
years from a heroin overdose.
As Roger Ebert wrote, this is the stuff
of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a spinning out of a web wherein the central character
cannot quite identify the Ignacio/Ángel/Zahara whom he is now encountering.
In
truth, we soon discover, he is not really Ignacio, but his younger brother,
Juan, who desires to become an actor, after having his affair with Ignacio’s
childhood priest who has now have removed himself from his church life to
become—in yet another switch of a name—Sr. Manuel Berenguer
(Lluís
Homar), who also pays a visit to Enrique to tell him the “real” truth, that
after being blackmailed by Ignacio/Zahara for years, he enlisted his young
lover, Juan, to kill his own brother, which Juan did by providing him with pure
heroin.
If you’re not dizzy yet, you should
simply stand up on your nearest chair and jump into the delights of this movie,
which like Hitchcock’s great masterwork, simply asks that you leap into its
sexual confusions, significant guilt, and impossible desires. Enrique is faced
with the dilemmas that James Stewart had to deal with in the Hitchcock work: is
his new Ignacio a redone version of the person he once loved or a simply a
murderer who has hung onto the jewelry (in this case the script and a letter)
of the double of which he has become?
Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar doesn’t answer
that question. Everyone in this film is a beautiful villain, destroying the
very ones they most desire. An epilogue tells us that Juan/Ángel went on to a
very successful career—until it declined, and he was forced into a television
series. And he murdered again, perhaps in a kind of odd revenge for Ignacio,
killing Manolo/Berenguer through a hit-and-run accident after having long been
blackmailed by the former priest himself.
Oddly, all these figures are so very
lovely—even the evil priest who is later, Juan’s lover—are such likable and
beautiful people (the former priest describes his time with Juan as the loveliest
period of his life) that you can’t truly hate them.
I think the film’s remarkable credits and the
music Alberto Iglesias explain this film; reminding one of a collaged version
of Saul Bass’s credits for Vertigo, they, however, move horizontally rather
than vertically, pushing together images of people and events that cannot any
longer escape their interactions as Hitchcock did constantly by his endless verticality.
These individuals are all trapped by their needs in horizontal time, and they
cannot escape rubbing together, destroying one another in the process. Leaping,
falling, collapsing into space are not allowed in the world of Bad Education.
The past haunts Almodóvar’s world in a way that the vertiginous spaces of
Hitchcock’s film—which strangely allowed a dreadfully aloof redemption—in a way
the destructive past of the Gallaecian world by this great Spanish director
does not.
Los Angeles, March 23, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (March 2020).
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