Friday, Dec. 17, 2004
Bad Education
After two flat-out masterpieces (All About My Mother, Talk to Her), Pedro Almodovar spins a film-noirish web around the sad headlines of clerical abuse of children. The writer-director always puts extraordinary creatures in extreme situations while lavishing sympathy on every character, including the evil ones; here the priest, up-close, is nearly as pathetic as he is predatory. His sanctity is a mask, but everyone in the movie wears disguises, especially Mexican wonder-boy Gael Garcia Bernal as an actor-drag queen-victim-conniver. Almodovar wears a mask too: a Janus-face to cover his rage at the harm done to the innocent. Bad Education can be seen as a brilliant debate on how art can conceal the deepest sin, and reveal it.