Bad Education [La Mala Educación] **** (2004, Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara) – Classic Movie Review 826

With La Mala Educación in 2004, Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar returns to the style and content of the films that made him famous in the Eighties with this provocative and sizzlingly stylish look at male sexuality and the movies.

Drawing teasingly on aspects his own life and his acute knowledge of old films noirs, Almodóvar playfully merges fact and fiction in his story of a young film director called Enrique Goded (played by Fele Martínez), who gets a controversial story for his new movie when a young man calling himself Ángel, Juan or Zahara (Gael García Bernal) arrives at his house with a tale about his school experiences.

The film takes in a condemnation of the Franco-era religious schooling as it examines the effect of sexual abuse at their Christian school on the lives of two longtime friends, Enrique and Ignacio (Francisco Boira).

Game for anything, Bernal, the Mexican actor from Y Tu Mama Tambien, proves a bright star indeed both as a bloke and even, astonishingly, as a drag queen (!)…

Almodóvar’s weird and wonderful plot starts with an attack on Spanish education in the Sixties, moves on to film-making in the Eighties, and ends up by being a full-blown film-noir of its own.