One of the most deeply personal works by a filmmaker whose cinema is never anything less than personal, Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 Bad Education spins a complicated, meta-filmic tale centered around two young gay artists in 1980s Spain: up-and-coming director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) and struggling actor Juan (Gael García Bernal). The latter will assume several roles throughout this tempestuous, shape-shifting drama, which reveals itself, in its final act, to be a work inspired by, and indebted to, classical American film noir—evident here in the structure of Almodóvar’s narrative, replete with extended flashbacks, psychologically revealing voiceovers, and a string of double-crosses, as well as in the self-serving motivations of his largely antiheroic characters. Through Bernal’s unscrupulous Juan, in particular, we find a character whose (triple) role-playing updates and absorbs the functions of noir’s femme fatale, funneling her treacherous energy and notorious status as an arousing and unknowable object of desire into a villainous queer character who is never confined to one appearance, or even gender.
Bad Education begins with the Bernal character imposing himself on Enrique, claiming to be Ángel Andrade, née Ignacio, Enrique’s long-lost childhood sweetheart, and hawking a screenplay entitled The Visit, a fictionalization of their traumatic experiences in Catholic boarding school during Spain’s Franco regime. (This, by the way, is the first of Almodóvar’s films to mention that thirty-six-year dictatorship.) In their youth, the two boys fell in love and were wrenched apart by Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a vindictive priest who sexually abused Ignacio and expelled Enrique. In reality, and as Enrique will soon come to learn when he pays an unexpected visit to Ángel/Ignacio’s elderly mother in Galicia, Ignacio is not the man he declares himself to be. He is, in fact, Juan, the younger brother of Ignacio, who himself died years before. But Enrique keeps this revelation to himself, since his overwhelming lust for Juan (who, in all fairness, looks like Gael García Bernal) is matched only by his fascination with the human enigma lying beneath this elaborate charade. Enrique and Juan subsequently begin a collaboration on the screen and between the sheets. Threaded throughout Bad Education are dramatized scenes from the film Enrique eventually makes of The Visit, in which Juan stars as a grown-up version of his brother Ignacio, aka Zahara, now a pre-op transgender drag queen whose rash attempts to blackmail her abuser in the present day prove fatal. Zahara’s visit to her abuser, as dramatized in The Visit, directly quotes a scene from Almodóvar’s 1987 noir-tinged thriller Law of Desire, in which Carmen Maura’s transgender character Tina pays a visit to the priest who molested her as a child. In that scene, we learn that Tina, like Bad Education’s young Ignacio, sang in the school choir, a detail lifted directly from Almodóvar’s early life.
It is only in its protracted third-act flashback that Bad Education becomes an outright noir, albeit one told in the gaudy, febrile, rainbow-wide colors that are the stylistic trademark of Almodóvar’s movies. In this passage, a visit from a dying and penitent Señor Berenguer (Lluís Homar), the actual inspiration behind Padre Manolo, untangles the full truth about Juan and his deceptions. As it turns out, the extortion plot of The Visit bears some semblance of truth, and Juan turns out to have been directly responsible for the death of his brother, who in real life grew to be a transgender drag queen with a crippling heroin addiction. When Ignacio blackmailed Berenguer for money for his gender reassignment surgery, the ex-priest—who abused him as a boy in boarding school, and later left the clergy, married, and spawned a son—made a reluctant reentry into his victim’s life and agreed to financially support him, only to fall hard for Juan, who was living with his brother in Valencia.
In these scenes, Juan is modeled strongly after Barbara Stanwyck’s iconic Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), seducing a man in helpless thrall to his beauty and hatching up a plan to off Ignacio by slipping some lethally pure heroin to his reckless nuisance of a brother. (As Juan tells Enrique during his plea for forgiveness in the film’s final scene, “You don’t know what it is to have a brother like that and live in a small town.”) When Berenguer and Juan meet in the truly bizarre Museum of Giants and Big Heads to talk through their dastardly plan, the latter dons a pair of sunglasses, a decision that might seem inexplicable to anyone unfamiliar with a near-identical scene from Double Indemnity, in which Stanwyck casually strolls through a grocery store, musing on plans of murder from beneath a pair of black shades. The connection to Stanwyck’s fierce mercenary, in many ways the prototypical femme fatale, is made explicit when, after killing Ignacio at home, Berenguer and Juan slip into a repertory house whose film noir festival is holding a screening of—what else?—Double Indemnity.
Juan attempts to become the author of his manifold real and reel identities, and goes to great, unscrupulous lengths to ensure his fate as a screen actor. But that by no means makes him an authentic author. In preparing to play his deceased brother, Juan be-comes a parasite, a cold-blooded culture vulture, leeching off of the legend of Robert De Niro’s Method-induced weight losses, but also of his brother’s queer identity and the legacies of the other drag queens whose performative styles he apes in his creation of Zahara. He is the perverse realization of one of Almodóvar’s final dedications in All About My Mother (1999): “To men who act and become women.” Like Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson, Juan is playing everyone for his gain, hoping it will all lead to a big payoff. In Phyllis’s case, it was an insurance payout; in Juan’s, it is the role of a lifetime and the movie stardom to which such a role is a surefire vehicle. Juan is arguably normalized by the film’s end, embracing a public heterosexuality that may or may not be a ruse. (It’s possible, after all, that his earlier homosexuality was simply a tool for self-advancement.) Phyllis is gunned down for her greed, while Almodóvar cheekily suggests that being relegated to television work is itself a kind of death for a would-be film star. Juan’s grief-stricken tears after the filming of Zahara’s murder serve a similar function to Phyllis’s abrupt declaration of love for Walter while facing the barrel of his gun in Double Indemnity: a confirmation that there is a human heart beating somewhere in the body of this toxic self-seeker. Although Almodóvar is humane enough to afford empathy to Juan, just as he affords it to his priests, his sympathies are first and foremost with the victims and survivors of his tale.
In Bad Education, Almodóvar works through what is debatably the darkest material he had ever tackled up until that point, material perhaps aggravated by its autobiographical origins. What is most haunting about Bad Education is surely the heartless severance of a pubescent bond defined by both bodily desire and camp cinephilia, which is in turn linked to the abuse that preceded and instigated it. (Almodóvar himself has been vague about whether or not the Enrique–Ignacio angle is autobiographical. When asked in a New York Times profile about how much of Bad Education is “rooted in personal memory,” he cagily answered, “Everything that isn’t autobiographical is plagiarism.”) I don’t think anyone can definitively answer if abuse can ever be remediated, but Almodóvar seems to believe that the resultant trauma can be, or can at least attempt to be. It is crucial that the film’s final note is one of proud self-acknowledgment, a salute to its creator’s own enduring passion for making cinema. Is Almodóvar arguing that trauma automatically leads to the need for a creative outlet, or just reflecting what holds true for him personally? His artistry, in particular, has never been expressly concerned with his suffering.
Though this turn towards noir does little to illuminate Almodóvar’s autobiographical interest in the malevolent hypocrisies of the Catholic Church and its leaders, it expands our understanding of Juan/Ángel/Zahara, a femme and homme fatale bent on perversely authoring his own destiny in Almodóvar’s film and the film that resides within it, no matter the sexual or violent mechanisms. As Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland write in their book Film Noir, “Driven by the erotics of death and the dark side of human nature, noir dramatizes the dead end of modern sexual longing and the desire for violence that no one gender may exclusively claim.” Though rooted in a historical grasp of film noir’s storied past, the use of noir in Bad Education is not so much nostalgic as it is remedial for the queer and transgender survivors of clerical abuse, a group that includes Almodóvar. To the dramatic intents that Fay and Nieland name in their quote, Almodóvar adds the emotional tug of a past that is never really past, and the lasting passion underlying so much of the triumphant art that Almodóvar’s screen incarnations—and the filmmaker himself—have made from the wreckage of life’s traumas.
Matthew Eng is a Brooklyn-based writer and critic who has contributed to the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, and elsewhere. He previously served as an associate editor and contributing writer with the Tribeca Film Festival.
