European Films

What to do next after you have made Todo sobre me madre (All about my mother), a supreme work that somehow distills a lifetime’s output of themes and styles but is also able to hold its own? You go into a new direction, and Hable con ella (Talk to her) showed us a more mature, accomplished filmmaker than ever before. No transvestites in sight (though more complicated gender issues than any of his previous films) but for the first time, two male protagonists (the "her" of the title refers to a girl in coma). No kitsch humour or set-decoration, but complicated multi-layered drama with contemplations on philosophical and moral questions and the functions of art in general. Now, with his newest film, Almodóvar seems to return to his roots, both in terms of his output and his own persona. La mala educación (Bad Education) goes back to the transvestites in bright pinks and pop-art kitsch of his earlier work, and the story itself is set in a Catholic boarding school under Franco and in the Movida counter-culture that followed in the post-Franco era; both settings in which Almodóvar himself grew up and was formed.

La mala educación seems more autobiographical than most of his works todate. It has learnt from Hable... as well, though, as it again presents us with two male protagonists. Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), is a young film-director,and when we meet him in 1980 Madrid, he is looking for a subject for his second film. His first has been an underground cult hit (much like Almodóvar’s own Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón) but he is unsure as to how to continue. He is visited by Ángel (Gael García Bernal), a stage actor wanting to break into film, whose real name, he reveals, is Ignacio, and who in fact was the first love of Enrique when they where both boys in Catholic boarding school thirteen years ago.

Ignacio has written a short story about their relationship at that school, and their fate at the hands of the literature teacher Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). In his story, he has also imagined how they would meet later in life and how they would make Padre Manolo pay for what he had done to them.   Enrique seems not interested at first, but when he starts to read the story, he remembers the innocence of his first love as a young boy, and he decides to make the story a basis for his new film. Ángel/Ignacio wants the role of Zahara, which is the stage-name of the film-character Ignacio as a transvestite, but Enrique is not convinced he is right for the role. Will Ángel be able toconvince Enrique he is the right person to play a fictive transformation of himself?  

Almodóvar uses extensive flashbacks to the childhood of Enrique and  Ignacio at the Catholic boarding school that, so we learn later on, are actually part of the film Enrique is making about it. This film-within-a-film takes up almost an hour, and it is really guesswork as to how much Ignacio, who wrote the storybased partially on his experiences, tells the truth, and how much Enrique, who lived the same story, altered Ignacio’s fiction when he adapted it for the film’s screenplay, and how much both of their memories have changed over time or have been censored by themselves or sacrificed for the purpose of a better narrative.  

The result is a challenging interplay between many levels of fact and fiction, with an added meta-layer when one considers that the director of the film La mala educación is himself being at least partially autobiographical. It is really a meditation on the interaction between the artists’ life and experiences on the one hand, and his artistic endeavour and output on the other. In the last act of La mala educación we get the impression that though life can inspire and influence an artist to a great extent, the art he creates is never a proper reflection of his life. Indeed, his work needs to adhere to rules that are set not by life itself, but by the medium he is working in; film noir in this case. This changes the direction of the film quite brusquely, much as was the case in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, and as in that film, many will find the ending to be something that does not follow logically from what has gone before. I would argue that in both cases, it is exactly the ending that makes these films not only tie up their story, but underline their central ideas and themes.   

Already in Hable... we had a small film within a film (which also starred Fele Martinez), and his experience of this has been enlarged greatly here and to good effect. Even though the various boundaries of what is fact and what is fiction are somewhat blurred, Almodóvar is capable of structuring it in a way that we never loses attention, even though it sometimes needs to go inreverse gear when some information is carefully revealed and everything that has gone before needs to be reconsidered. La mala educación is a film that demands to be seen more than once, as all great films do, to understand the mastery of its fragile structure and the implications it has for the various characters and the transformations they gothrough. Unlike Ozon’s Swimming Pool in which a writer seems to getlost in her own fiction and which was made with an almost austere simplicity, La mala educación is an incredibly baroque film full of trompe l’oeil and references to countless other films, including many films noirs to which the director seems to be paying direct homage.   

Mexican actor Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también, El crimen del Padre Amaro) pulls off an incredible triple role with verve and must be counted as one of the most promising young actors to grace the screen today. His characterisation of a very flawed character nevertheless knows how to retain our sympathy right up to the bleak ending. Fele Martínez, who already had a small role in Hable con ella, holds his own as the young film director Enrique, not a small feat considering he was playing an Almodóvar-like character and being directed by the master himself.Several other well-known faces from the Almodóvar-universe pop-up for small cameo roles, most notably Javier Cámara, ( Hable con ella's male nurse) who provides some much-needed comic-relief early on in the film as a transvestite friend of Zahara. 

Almodóvar’s films have never been for everyone, and with La mala educación he presents us with one of his least mainstream films as well as his most personal film to date. Personal because the story contains autobiographical elements and because it contains his musings on the relation between art and the life of the artist. It seems like La mala educación was the only film he could have made after the triumphs of Todo sobre mi madre and Hable con ella, but since it is so personal and so intricately constructed, its audience will likely be more limited than his previous two efforts.

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