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Bad Education (La Mala Educación) (2006) Director: Pedro Almodóvar Cast: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Gimémez Cacho, Lluís Homar Time: 106 min. Spanish with English subtitles Rating: |
Like many Pedro Almodóvar films, Bad Education is an intense, sometimes surreal experience. The characters and the plot are strong but understated, and the films’ themes become Almodóvar’s key focus.
Bad Education opens with a voiceover story about a man who dies while riding his motorcycle through snowstorm across a plain. The motorcycle keeps rolling across the plain with the corpse frozen in place. The story’s narrator is Enrique Goded, a director who, when faced with writer’s block, turns to the tabloids for script ideas.
Moments later, someone knocks on the door. The unexpected visitor is Ignacio Pérez, a struggling stage actor looking for his big break into films and Goded’s first love, who he hasn’t seen since school. Ignacio is also carrying his short story “The Visit,” a semi-autobiographical tale about their childhood and their connection to a sexually abusive priest from their school. After reading the story, Goded receives the inspiration for his film.
This opening scenes establishes not just the main characters, but all of the themes and metaphors that drive this film.
Perhaps the most fascinating element of Bad Education is its layered storytelling. We are presented with several stories within a story: the story Ignacio and Enrique’s distant past, the story of Ignacio’s recent past, the story in the present, even an ending story of their futures. We also have a film within a film; what we initially perceive as flashbacks of Ignacio’s recent past are actually scenes from Goded’s film.
Perceptions of identity and reality figure prominently within this multi-tiered framework. Characters’ identities shift continually through the layers, giving us a new perception of them with each viewing. What’s intriguing is that the characters’ personalities remain true to their inner natures, regardless of our changing perspectives; they seem to know who they are even if we don’t.
This film also plays wonderfully with our perceptions of reality. It takes off on the idea that “truth is stranger than fiction” and shows us that “truth is messier than fiction.” Ignacio’s story and Goded’s film create pleasant fictional realities that explain unpleasant events as the outcomes of simple, understandable, non-perverse motives. But we soon discover that the reality behind the fiction is much more sordid and complicated than anything any writer could imagine. The reality is too disturbing to be recorded as fiction, so the fiction must be sanitized to provide maximum escapism.
In the final shot, a super-close-up of the word “passion,” Almodóvar gives us a clue about what makes the stories of our reality so sordid and complicated. Perhaps a better translation would be “desire” or “lust,” the force that too frequently drives all human behavior. Strong passions motivate all of the characters in Bad Education, and the film explores the deprave lengths each of them would travel to satisfy their deepest desires.
So what does Almodóvar imply by tying the idea of all-driving passion to the opening metaphor of the frozen dead man driving a motorcycle through a snowstorm? That actions driven by desire are dead on arrival? Or that the actions we take to satisfy our desires only lead to the messy realities we uncover? And is this moral such bad education?
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