“You’re an improbable person, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity. An inability to love or be loved. Insatiable ambition and talent. We deserve each other.” – Addison DeWitt, All About Eve
“Hola, soy actor.” Angel Andrade (Gael García Bernal) stands in the doorway to the colorful Madrid offices of El Azar productions (translation: chance/fate/destiny). The year is 1980. He has come to visit an old friend, hotshot director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), whose devoted production manager (and jilted lover) obstructs his entry, but not his view. “He isn’t here,” the man says, though Angel’s eyes are already trained on his target. He tells him the name he went by before adopting his stage name. “Ignacio Rodriguez” gets him through the door. Angel moves forward into the room, pulled toward Enrique’s office like a moth to a flame. His beauty is obscured by stubble and shadows, but the intensity of his gaze cuts through the fog of the director’s memory. The men share a tentative embrace and sit down to talk business. Enrique is in the throes of writer’s block, combing the tabloids for inspiration. Angel has just the thing: a screenplay, titled La Visita, partially inspired by the traumas they experienced in the Catholic school of their boyhoods. Its framing device, Angel says, is fiction. It follows Zahara (formerly Ignacio), a drag performer, sex worker, and grifter who returns to the school to blackmail her way into a better life.
These are the bare essentials of the noirish meta-melodrama Bad Education (2004), one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most ravishing and accomplished films. Synthesizing its maker’s postmodern penchant for mischief and hysteria with classical influences from Hitchcock to Mankiewicz, this psychosexual thriller strips our socially constructed fantasies — and the forms of derangement that emerge in their wake — to the bone. Its matryoshka narrative structure patiently and ruthlessly lays bare the innate violence of storytelling, and the lines that people will cross in order to play a part in that process.
The first 45 minutes of Bad Education are a brusque yet patient descent down a diegetic rabbit-hole. Hours after Angel and Enrique’s awkward reunion, the director sits in an empty mansion and dives into La Visita by lamplight. Our first glimpse of Zahara (also played by Bernal) is a torn fragment of her face pasted on the wall of an old movie house alongside countless others ripped down and paved over, a palimpsest of attractions consumed and forgotten. We travel back to the fateful night when the rundown Cine Olympo hosted the raunchy traveling show “La Bomba” — which brought Zahara back to the small town where the school still stands — through a fade to the full poster in the lobby. Zahara’s show-stopping entrance, lip-syncing to “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” is both a performance and a seduction that reunites her with Enrique Serrano (Alberto Ferreiro), who is too drunk to recognize his former classmate or remember the encounter. She leaves an impassioned letter on his pillow, and sneaks off to enact her plan.
Cornering former literature teacher and current headmaster Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho) in his office, she presents herself as Ignacio’s sister. She tells him Ignacio is dead, and the man can barely conceal his devastation. She presents a short story by Ignacio, in which Manolo is a central character. As he reads, we travel deeper through fiction and time. The schoolboys are on a daytrip to the country, and while the others are swimming nearby, Ignacio sings Moon River, Manolo serenading on guitar. The boys dive and splash to the eerily angelic melody, and finally the camera approaches the thicket that conceals the sequestered pair. The strumming stops, and Ignacio’s voice begins to quake in fear. The visibly shaken Manolo locks the office door, and — still feigning innocence — demands to know why Ignacio returned to the school if he was being abused. He already knows the answer: the boy had fallen in love with a classmate.
Manolo keeps reading, and sequences of religious and academic ritual, punctuated by Ignacio and Enrique’s stolen glances, collide the artifice of the church with the artifice of the movies. The boys steal away to the Cine Olympo and fool around under the glow of the screen, the film in front of them (which echoes Zahara’s eventual return) functioning as both a portal and an enclosure. Their secret is eventually discovered by the jealous Manolo, who has Enrique expelled, and their tearful parting glances fade into the faces of their adult counterparts as Angel returns to the office, smiling and clean-shaven. Though the men beam at each other, Alberto Iglesias’ gutting, mercurial score morphs from choral notes to Herrmannesque strings, puncturing the fluency of this uncanny effect with strains of menace and uncertainty. After all, we’re just getting started, and the film has several more tricks up its sleeve.
This funhouse of convergent fictions is put on pause as Angel and Enrique plan, flirt, and negotiate; Angel wants to play Zahara, and will do anything for the part. Enrique, though undeniably piqued, is held back — he tells Angel that he’s too well-built for the part, but his attitude betrays a lack of trust and, above all, a lack of recognition of the boy he once knew. An erotic poolside reverie is soured by the transactions that define their sexual and artistic courtship, and the men proceed to spiral in opposite directions. As Angel tries to slim down and starts working at a gay bar in order to study the queens up close, Enrique does some digging into Ignacio’s past.
The pair reunite on new terms; Angel gets the part, and their masochistically contingent affair continues throughout the production of La Visita. Enrique changes the ending, opting for Zahara to be murdered by the priests, and on this final day of shooting — a sequence that subtextually reveals the diegetic origin of the flashbacks we’ve been shown — the real Father Manolo (Lluís Homar) pays the studio a visit. Angel breaks down in tears as they take apart the set, and it’s unclear whether his grief is for Zahara, for what was left of Ignacio, or for the conclusion of the role he has so relished playing.
This Manolo is sly, sinisterly macho, and unapologetically lecherous — virtually unrecognizable from the mewling reverence that Cacho brought to his fictional doppelganger. He both overturns and reaffirms our grasp on reality, his account of events tying together the reflections and parallels that run through Bad Education’s endless chain of visualized letters and manuscripts (and revealing the inspiration for Zahara’s story to boot). He is even less trustworthy than the conflicting sources of narration that dominated the film’s first two-thirds, but Almodóvar’s films are situated in a world where characters are often the sum of their darkest impulses; the film’s most reprehensible testimony rings sickeningly and unshakably true.
Bad Education is obsessed with and overwhelmed by the insidious, conditioning powers of both script and scripture, of the camera’s supposed ability to give meaning to our suffering, and of performance as a professional practice, a survival tool, and a weapon. Though lies are central to its genetic makeup, the film builds emotive power through the essential truths that float to the surface, because and in spite of all those murky layers of fabulation (Bernal’s multiple translucent tours-de-force are central to this friction; he is both springboard and lightning rod). Some may find its ending abrupt, but it is crucial that Almodóvar dwells on the human fallout of his film’s accumulation of misdeeds rather than belaboring their moral and conceptual implications. This is one of his greatest — and most consistent — accomplishments as an artist; he lets go before we have time to think, while still allowing us plenty of space to feel. And the feelings that Bad Education elicits are among the most sticky, abject, and multivalent in the director’s extensive catalog of double-edged frissons.
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