Week 36: Bad Education

What a cool movie. I was very pleasantly surprised after reading the disc jacket, which promised a story about a young man reconnecting with a classmate from their boyhood Catholic school where they had a sexually abusive teacher.

And not that it’s not an interesting story in itself but let’s be honest. It’s not exactly a plot surprise to find that the teacher is fondling all the boys in the chapel, is it? I wasn’t expecting too many surprises, but Bad Education turned out to be a densely complex and intricate story.

At any given time, we’re watching three different versions of the main character, Ignacio/Angel (his name changes a few more times, which should give you an idea of how complex the film is). The trick is trying to figure out which if any of the versions is the real Ignacio. It appears he’s grown up to be a transvestite hustler on one hand – on another; he’s a writer pedaling a script about a transvestite hustler. On yet a third, he’s really his brother pretending to be Ignacio. Whew. It’s a lot to handle.

The movie is written and director by Pedro Almodovar, whom I’ve loved for his other films such as Talk to Her and All About My Mother. He often casts Gael Garcia Bernal, and once again, he plays the lead role in Bad Education.

If I have one big criticism of this film, it’s the ending, in which Almodovar laboriously spells out every detail of the plot, unwinding all the interweaving stories that were so interesting. The result is that the film is stripped of much of its mystery and a fair amount of intelligence. I would have preferred to try to figure out Ignacio’s story on my own.

PS: There is something asunder at the Queue household. Whenever we play a movie with even the hint of a subtitle, Grant becomes distracted and starts busying himself elsewhere. I am slowly becoming convinced that he can’t read. I am going to work on this theory by only communicating to him via post-it notes for the next several days. Wish us luck!