Almodóvar's Bad Education: Not just Tarts and Vicars

Almodovar's wonderful Bad Education (Mala Educacíon, 2004) is a story about passion - not only it's dark and dirty side, but it's corrupt and violent side. Coming on the creative heels of his slightly unsettling Talk to Her, Bad Education revolves around a story of child abuse, forbidden love, catholic priests and drag queens. As if that wasn't enough, for any serious film buff, there's a fair amount of flirtatious, 'film noir' intertextuality going on at the same time.

Set in both Franco's 1960s Spain and a liberated Madrid in the 1980s, Bad Education is an almost uniquely male space, dealing with male bonds and male sexuality - or at least one direction it can go in. Having put female sexuality into a coma in 'Talk to Her', women are now banished almost entirely as the film focuses entirely on men and boys, moving from first homoerotic love and groping at the movies, to adult paedophile lust in the cloisters, and the fragility and victimization of transvestite identity.

A large part of the film's interest lies in the nature of the story-telling. Told as a story within a film/film within a film, this layering of what is really three narratives creates a complex narrative pattern. Indeed, much of the film's power comes from not understanding where the film is going or what is actually going on.

The opening finds Enrique, a 20-something successful film director in the middle of a creative crisis about his next production. Into the midst of this frame narrative walks an old school friend, Ignacio, clutching a typewritten story based on their childhood. This story is set in 1964, when the two school boys fall in love with cinema and each other, but are later separated by abusive and jealous priest Father Manolo. Enrique decides to use the script for his next film, and Ignacio's story, entitled 'The Visit', sets off a dual narrative with the plot switching relentlessly between past and present, reality and film sequences. A third narrative begins to merge the two narratives together: Enrique's film, Ignacio's identity, the priest's fate, playing out a complicated plot more deviant than a trip round Birmingham without your A-Z. As Almodovar himself says "It's like a triangle that becomes another triangle and another triangle in the future. It's like a triangle that becomes a vicious circle."


This glorious, disorienting experience is all part of the fabric of the film, which is subtlely hinted at from the opening titles. A glorious artwork of red, white and black reveals fragmented film posters, hanging in torn shreds from walls. This idea pops up throughout the film, in various guises, such as outside the now derelict cinema of Ignacio's youth, pictured left. As Almodovar cuts between the different elements of his story, from the past to the present, from any notion of truth to that of fiction; and from the real to the dominance of the screen, the significance of the opening titles begins to unfold. This is a story in pieces: lives in pieces, characters in pieces, identities in pieces and the viewer is given the task of somehow making sense of it all...or not as the case might be.

It's not just the story-telling that stands out. Bad Education is also notable for a range of great performances, particularly from Gael Garcia Bernal, whose recent lead roles in The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien have justifiably given him international star status. Bernal shows an impressive range in Almodovar’s film, moving from starlet to drag queen to indifferent con artist, impressing not just with his acting range, but, let's face it, his incredible screen presence and beauty. How many men are there in film history who have played the role of femme fatale? Probably not many, and surely none as mesmerizingly as Bernal.

Bad Education is just one of those must-see movies, and the kind of film that makes you want to go back and examine, or re-examine, Almodóvar's earlier work. It's certainly a very important addition to the restricted list of challenging modern cinema.

Meat is Murder: "Carnages"

Vegetarians should look away now. Lovers of just a good, old story might want to do the same. 'Carnages' is a debut film by the young French film director Delphine Gleize which seems to lie somewhere between the surrealist work of Luis Bunuel and Anderson's 'Magnolia' (although this might be a tad over-generous).

'Carnages' revolves around the concept of dead flesh and it's ability to effect human behaviours, although if you go looking for a plot its hard to tie down any specifics. The film seems deliberately to avoid any narrative structure, instead playing with various themes and motifs which defy any coherent synthesis. The only seemingly unifying thread in this near surrealist vision is the circulation of a dead meat and the random yet interconnected patterns of people's lives....

After a Spanish matador, played by Julien Lescarret) is gored by a bull, the bull is killed and taken to an abattoir. The body of the bull is cut up into parts and sent to various destinations and uses around Europe.

The eyes are sent to an unfaithful scientist (Jacques Gamblin) who is having an affair while his wife is pregnant. One of the bull's bones is sold by an Italian actress to a couple with a huge great dane and an epilectic little girl (Raphaelle Molinier). The horns are given by an elderly, doting mother to her taxidermist son (Bernard Sens) as a birthday present. Parts also end up in a restaurant meal eaten by a middle-aged woman (Angela Molina) with a secret kept from her daughter - who happens to be the epilectic little girl's teacher.

Somewhere in all this the viewer might sense there is something going on with secrets, human communication and identity. There is also an interesting portrayal of motherhood through some of the characters, ranging from the intriguing elderly mother who dotes almost incestually on her son, to the pregnant woman who doesn't reveal the nature of her multiple pregnancy to the Spanish mother who hides her own personal secret and one woman's trips to her local swimming pool for adult re-birthing classes (played by Catherine Deneuve's daughter Chiara Mastroianni). Unfortunately, these glimpses of any possible cohesion vanish as quickly as they emerge. While some directors might have turned this into a key feature, one senses that it might be a step too far too soon for Gleize, whose film ends up loosing its momentum and purpose.

That said, there is some beautiful photography, and there are several impressive performances. It's the kind of ambitious film that does stay with you afterwards, even in its apparent failures, and I would certainly keep my eye out for the next Delphine Gleize offering.

Times are Hard?

Some days it's as much as you can do to eat your gluten-free muesli without choking. This morning it was the 'The Sunday Times' list of the best 20 songs of 2005.

It's hard enough to get your head round the idea of why anyone would waste their time trying to compile such a list of worthies. So by the time you get to the list itself, you know you're going to be struggling.

After the shock of realising that I didn't know half the names picked, came the sadder one that I knew the names left.... Please tell me that the inclusion of Girls Aloud's Biology is a demonic, pre-festive joke - the rambling of a man already hiding with his granny's sherry bottle..... is this the same song that has them dressed in a video in different dresses and feminine poses, where there is as much irony as a Christmas turkey watching 'Chicken Run'?

After listing more notable considerations such as the Arctic Monkeys 'Fake Tales from San Francisco' and the Crooked Fingers' 'Call to Love', they arrive like a rabid lemming at the Sugarbabes' 'Push the Button'. Before you even have time to gasp for breath they then announce their no. 1 is the Stereophonics' 'Dakota'. Ok, I appreciate any list is going to be nothing more than subjective ramblings, and I should just turn the page wearily, but do they really have to play so hard to the gallery?

Jonathan Glazer's 'Birth'

Finally got round to seeing Jonathan Glazer's film 'Birth', which I arrived at after watching John Duigan's intriguing 'Lawn Dogs' and it's paedophilic undercurrent (a long story...).

'Birth' explores the relationship between Anna (Nicole Kidman) and a 10 year old boy (Cameron Bright) who turns up out of nowhere, claiming to be her dead husband, Sean. The grown-up Sean had died suddenly 10 years earlier, and Anna is now on the point of marriage to a new man, Joseph (Danny Huston). The young Sean's arrival at the door of their upper-middle class New York appartment and his insistance that Anna should not marry her new partner throws the couple's life into progressive chaos. Despite the advice of those around her, the mysterious claims of the child and his knowledge of her past marriage begin to play on Anna's mind and she slowly succumbs to the idea that the young Sean may well be her late husband.

This descent into the irrational, or more over into that no-man's-land between irrationality and the rational, is subtly portrayed by the film's use of careful ambiguity and understatement. While a crisis of the psyche may not be anything new for women in Cinema, the nature of Anna's turmoil moves the film into a quagmire of female morality that few films have sought to address: female desire and young boys. (As far as I remember...if anyone can think of similar instances in film or books, please let me know!) This moral passage or crossing is powerfully rendered by a long cinematic gaze at Anna's face as she sits at a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre (the mise-en-abime love plot of which obviously has its own moral transgression...)

The real subject matter is the utterly destructive power of grief and mourning, but clearly it is their transgressive power that the film concentrates on. Obviously, the transformation of Anna's latent grief into desire is made all the more disturbing by its fixation on a 10 year old boy - a child Anna believes she can seriously run away with and marry once he is old enough. In some ways this is almost a gender inversion of Nabokov's flight with his female nymphet, where he writes in 'Lolita':

"Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose designate as "nymphets."

While the outstanding Cameron Bright plays Sean as a young child so suitably ambiguous and unsettling, in his other worldliness, he could almost be auditioning for 'The Omen', there is something in his reserved 'maturity' that begs the question if this is a male role reversal of the nymphet. When Anna sits in a bar with Sean, asking him about how he will fulfil her needs, his quiet response, that he knows about that, leaves the viewer in a horribly ambiguous position as to the origins of his knowledge (reincarnation, boyhood fantasy or previous maternal abuse?).

It is here that the wonderful ambiguity of the film begins to cause problems. For what is the most disturbing, for me at any rate, is the presentation of the child Sean in the film, and the role he was seen to play as the agent of Anna's moral transgression. If Anna eventually succumbs to the idea that Sean is her husband, it is the child who is portrayed throughout the film as the instigator of her emotional turmoil. It is the child who pursues Anna, it is he who insists he is her husband, and it is he who eventually, at the film's resolution, receives treatment for his 'problem'. Yet the idea of this boy's desire for an adult is never really explored by the film itself. The young Sean's 'desire' seems to become a mere plot mechanism to serve other ends. Therein, for me, lies the most disturbing layer of the film: the potential representation of children as not only complicit but active manipulators of adult desire (an excuse used apparently by many paedophiles in defence of their activities). Despite the film's beautiful use of ambiguity, and however compelling the film, this might be one aspect that just sits a little too heavy for some.