By Jorge Minguell

The word education may mean either the way we learn things or the way we do the things we learnt. In his film, Bad Education, Almodóvar presents the dramatic story of a forbidden desire between a priest and a young boy. It also outrageously describes pure fag rage after the excesses of Spain’s Franquist period. It is even a desperate love triangle of souls searching for direction. However, more than anything else, Bad Education translates the complexities of his desires in a cinematographic mode. Almodóvar, audaciously, erects an aesthetic artifact which leads the viewer to realize that in times of uncertainty and pain what really matters in cinema and in life is to plunge into passion. Take it or leave it. There are not too many other choices in a post 09/11 and 05/11 world. And, in letting our lives to be constrained by the dichotomous parameters of cause and consequence, good and evil… we definitely need it. Why?

1980.

Enrique (Fele Martínez), a young filmmaker, receives the unexpected visit of his childhood friend and lover. His name is Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), a beautiful and ambitious young actor. He wants Enrique to read a short story. He wrote it thinking of their child experiences and its title is “The Visit”.

As soon as the film begins, the opening credits immediately distance us from his former creation: Talk To Her (2002). The design by Antxon Gómez resembles a gloomy Saul Bass prologue rather than a festive collage. The opening music by Alberto Iglesias, with its sumptuous metals and strings arrangements, closely reminds us of an Alfred Hitchcock preamble rather than an Iberian melodrama. This is a noir. We are not going to cry sick mothers or necrophilic lovers. But hold on… Though we do not feel any sympathy for Ignacio and Enrique, as we may have had for Benigno and Marcos of Talk To Her, with the latter they share the fulfillment of their passion as the way to live. In Bad Education, redemption or suffering are not to be glorified. Passion, but also pain and sorrow inevitably, is the object of desire. Passion becomes the way to go beyond the bad - religious, sexual, social, political- education we were imparted. However, passion is also a bad education in itself. Thus, this is why the precious filmmaking of Almodóvar makes sense beyond the coldness of its narrative and visual trickeries. Passion should be moved far from any moral and ethical constraint. It should be freed from the legacies of our education and our time. Eventually, passion will let us find our place in the world and prompt a clearer understanding of ourselves. And, as a consequence, filmmaking will approach it in its complexities and ambiguities. However, how to shoot its painful contradictions?

1960.

Ignacio (Ignacio Perez) is a beautiful young kid singing “Moon River” accompanied at the guitar by Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez Cacho). Seated together they don’t pay attention to the other kids playing in the lake. Ignacio looks to the priest. The priest looks to Ignacio… Behind the bushes, behind the looks, and behind God, Ignacio is all that Father Manolo desires.

Behind the kitsch, Almodóvar presents the priest as a man whose love for God should not leave space his love for Ignacio. The priest is not a monster. He is simply an individual struggling with his identity. Ignacio, after the approach of the Father, runs, falls and accidentally hits his head against a stone. A drop of blood falls from his head dividing the screen in two. It marks a point of rupture in the film as well as in their lives. Ignacio and Manolo will now have to fight for their identities. Manolo is assaulted by his anxiety for being normal, while Ignacio wants to be a woman. Almodóvar acutely provides the way out to the existential beings of the two characters through the act of performing. Acting, playbacking, praying or lying become accepted ways to explore the nature of these desires, otherwise unvoiceble. Since the film Matador (1986), performance has being a recurrent theme. However, it is in Bad Education that the act of performing becomes the space where the desires of the main characters are expressed as freed from any physical or psychological constraint. It is the where and when passions are real and the line between reality and fiction is completely blurred. Thus, though we are brought to perceive that more is out there, Almodóvar let us see only what the characters want us to see. By stressing the visual and narrative role of the performance, he acknowledges its contradictions and complexities in the making of identity and, therefore, any story/history. During the playbacks Zahara can express her feminine identity beyond her silicon implants. And, in the act of acting as a husband and father, Father Manolo finds his normality. But, is not the cinema the place where to voice desires and passions through performance and narration?

1977.

Manolo Berenguer (Luis Homar), a married editor, recognizes Ignacio (Francisco Boira) under the used body of a junkie transsexual. Now, his name is Zahara and lives with his brother Juan (Gael García Bernal), a beautiful and ambitious young actor from whom Manolo falls desperately in love. Juan and Manolo become lovers and plan to kill Zahara giving her a fatal dose of heroin. The same evening of the crime, Manolo and Juan look for refuge in a cinema showing noir movies.

In Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown (1989), cinema sentenced the end of a relationship. In Talk To Her (2002), cinema marked the fatal journey leading to redemption. In Bad Education, cinema is a refuge. After killing Zahara, Manolo and Juan find shelter in a movie theater. Cinema is the refuge for the young Enrique and Ignacio where they discover the pleasures of their bodies and fiction. And, finally, for the old Enrique, it is the refuge to his obsessions with the art of filmmaking. In this film where fiction is intertwined with reality and realities are fiction, it is clear that cinema is a refuge for Almodóvar too. For him (and for Enrique), making films is a way to organize the world of desire. The act of creation becomes the only redemptive passion. When Juan asks Enrique the reason why he based his movie on “The Visit,” he answers, “…to know how far could I go.” Facing the complexity of reality and the ambiguity of desire, Enrique and Almodóvar don’t loose faith on an art that within its boundaries is taken as the perfect medium to talk to one self within reality and through fiction. That is why the last shot of the movie is nothing but a big close up of the word passion. Passion for life and passion for cinema. Passion for the art of building stories that will reflect the complexity of truth. Passion for the art of imaging desire and for the art of giving it a beginning and an end.

2004.

After experiencing this filmic game, the viewer, as well as the characters, realize that the nature of desire is nothing but its labynthic essence. An essence endowed with the stunning beauty of the unknown that we are always trying to reach but that –at the end- always escapes us. It is a beauty whose destiny is nothing but its own death. And that is why the story of Manolo, Ignacio and Enrique is our own story. The story of every person who desired something in his/her life.

When the lights turn on, the film grows on us with the subtlety of rare beauties. When the lights turn on, the only think we can do is to thank Almodóvar for being so impolite. Gracias.