Bad Education

The folks at Slant Magazine are wicked smart. They say what I am not sharp enough to say about this amazing movie.

More so than Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Almodóvar’s heartbreaking Pieta acknowledges cinema as an extension of the soul. Because it seems to touch on every theme and perversion seen throughout the director’s illustrious 20-plus-year career, Bad Education truly evokes the sensation of a Jackson Pollock “action” painting: Almodóvar’s canvas—like that of another hot-blooded drama queen, Federico García Lorca—is one of uncensored emotion and pure energy. There isn’t a single person in the film (or film-within-a-film) whose life isn’t fractured (next to Brian De Palma’s Sisters, Bad Education may feature the greatest use of split screen in movie history), states of unrest the director fabulously emphasizes by frequently situating actors before mosaic art or walls covered in paper decorated with jagged lines shooting in all sorts of directions.

Just as everyone remembers the silent film sequence from Talk to Her, no one will forget the “Moon River” scene from Bad Education. During a school retreat, a young Ignacio (Ignacio Pérez) is forced by Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho) to sing the Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer classic while the boy’s half-naked buddies swim at a nearby spring. Unlike Talk to Her, Bad Education is more schematic than gimmicky, but Almodóvar is still scripting a complex morality by conflating movie dreams and sexual awakening. This subversive sequence is at once funny and tender. Almodóvar tastefully and cleverly obscures Manolo’s abuse of Ignacio at just the right moment (“Waiting 'round the bend,” the boy sings), anticipating the masochistic role-reversal of their future relationship in the emotional back-and-forth of the song’s lyrics, much in the same way the swimming children prefigures the incredibly erotic pool sequence between the two leads later in life.

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