2004 Movie Titles
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2004 Movie Titles
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Bad Education
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Fele Martinez, Leonor Watling, Francisco Boira, Petra Martínez
Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
Screenplay by: Pedro Almodóvar
Release Date: November 19, 2004
Running Time: 109 minutes
MPAA Rating: NC-17 (for a scene of explicit sexual content)
Box Office: $5,211,842 (US total)
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
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Madrid, 1980: Enrique Goded, a young director of twenty-seven who, despite his youth, has already directed three successful films, is looking through the news in the tabloids for a story for his fourth film. (One item in particular attracts his attention and he cuts it out: “In a zoo in Taiwan, a woman threw herself into a pool full of crocodiles at a time when there was the greatest number of visitors. While the crocodiles were devouring her, the woman hugged one of them without making a sound.”)
The doorbell rings. The visitor is an attractive young man with a beard who says he is his old school friend, Ignacio Rodríguez. Enrique remembers his school friend perfectly, but he doesn’t recognize any of his features in the young visitor. But it’s also true that they haven’t seen each other for sixteen years.
Enrique doesn’t know it yet, but the search for the story for his next film is in front of him, smiling and holding out his hand. In their school days, Ignacio had a literary vocation, but he gradually gave it up for that of acting. In any case, he has brought a short story called “The Visit.” He gives it to Enrique in case it might interest him.
The story was inspired by their childhood in the school, their problems with the priests, in particular with the Principal, the repression, the soccer games, the hypocrisy, the distortion of the spirit, the harassment, the masses sung in Latin by Ignacio who was the soloist in the choir, etc.
It also tells, in parallel, of an essential discovery for the two kids - the cinema: Sara Montiel, “Hercules,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Moon River,” “Johnny Guitar,” etc.
The imagination of Ignacio-author has the three characters – himself, Enrique, and the Principal – meet (in the short story) years later, when they are adults. Enrique, although still young, has become a frustrated family man in the provinces, Father Manolo has left the congregation, and Ignacio has become Zahara.
Zahara is a drug addict transvestite who impersonates Sara Montiel (a sort of Spanish Mae West Gay icon of the ‘60s and ‘70s) and is a member of a fifth-rate variety company. The story is told from Zahara’s point of view on the night she performs in a Casino in the same city where Enrique and he went to school.
The encounter between the three characters, in the short story, ends tragically. Enrique Goded reads “The Visit” with great interest. He is moved by the first part, which deals with their childhood, in particular, his love story with Ignacio, which was broken up by Father Manolo. In love with Ignacio, Father Manolo expelled Enrique from the school so as not to have to compete with him. The second part, when Ignacio (who has now become Zahara) visits the school disconcerts him, but it also interests him.
He decides to adapt “The Visit” and make it into a film. When he tells Ignacio (who insists that Enrique call him by his current stage name Ángel Andrade), the latter explodes with joy. He only imposes one condition, that he acts in the film. Enrique doesn’t mind, but when Ignacio (Ángel) asks to play the lead, that is, the transvestite Zahara, Enrique tells him that he isn’t right for the character (neither does he understand the request). He is too masculine, too well built, physically he is just the opposite to a character like Zahara. Ignacio (Ángel) insists, and asks Enrique to trust him. Enrique replies that he finds it very hard to trust him, and they end up having a violent argument. Ignacio (Ángel) goes off, saying that if he doesn’t play Zahara there won’t be any film.
In the days following the argument, Enrique can’t get the mysterious visitor out of his mind. He investigates - after all that’s one of the storyteller’s jobs, investigating his characters in depth in order to understand them better and tell them better – and discovers that the attractive boy who came to ask for work is not Ignacio Rodríguez but an impostor who had access to the real Ignacio. He also discovers that the real Ignacio died three years earlier, shortly after writing “The Visit.”
The shock of the discovery increases when, a few days later, Ángel Andrade (the false Ignacio) visits him again. He has shaved his beard and slimmed down a little. Enrique thinks he has come to apologize and to explain everything, but it isn’t so. The false Ignacio apologizes for the violent argument they had the last time they met, and offers Enrique the rights of “The Visit” to make a film of it, without imposing any conditions.
Enrique doesn’t say a word about Ignacio or mention his imposture at any time. He only asks to be allowed to audition for the role of Zahara. (Enrique listens to him in astonishment). As he can see, Ángel has already slimmed down and he has also started working in a gay bar in order to learn how to be a “queen.” Ángel is also receiving private lessons from Sandra, a transvestite who specializes in impersonating Sara Montiel.
Enrique auditions him, gives him the part and makes him his lover. He wants to know the impostor’s reasons and how far he will go with his imposture, and he wants to know how Ignacio, his old school friend, died. He doesn’t care what price he has to pay for the adventure.
Long months of preparation go by. The first day of shooting on “The Visit” arrives, and so does the last one. Enrique penetrates Ángel Andrade frequently, but only physically. He doesn’t manage to discover anything about Ignacio’s death and Angel’s mystery remains intact. But on the last day someone visits the set and hides behind the crew in order to see without being seen.
When Enrique goes back to his office to gather up his things, he catches the mysterious stranger in there, rummaging through photos from the shoot. The visitor calls himself by his last name, Mr. Berenguer, but Enrique recognizes Father Manolo, dressed in civilian clothes and seventeen years older than the last time he saw him, the day he expelled him from the school. Now it is Enrique who expels him from his office.
But Mr. Berenguer remains motionless and asks him: “Don’t you want to know how Ignacio died and who killed him? Wouldn’t you like to know the identity of Ángel Andrade, the actor in your film?”
Driven by the same suicidal curiosity that led him to work with Ángel Andrade while knowing he was an impostor, Enrique lets Father Manolo tell him the true story of Ignacio-adult and as he listens he feels like the woman who threw herself into the pool of crocodiles and hugged them while they ate her.
Director's Comments
I had to make “Bad Education.” I had to get it out of my system before it became an obsession. I had worked repeatedly on the script for over ten years and I could have gone on like that for another decade. Because of the amount of possible combinations, the story of “Bad Education” was only finished once the film had been shot, edited and mixed.
“Bad Education” is a very intimate film, but not exactly autobiographical. I mean that I’m not recounting my life at school or all that I lived and learned during the first years of the “movida,” although those are the two periods in which the story is set (1964 and 1980, with an interval in 1977). Of course my memories were important when it came to writing the script. After all, I lived in the settings and in the periods in which it takes place.
“Bad Education” is not a settling of scores with the priests who “bad-educated” me or with the clergy in general. If I had needed to take revenge I wouldn’t have waited forty years to do so. The church doesn’t interest me, not even as an adversary. Nor is the film a reflection on the “movida” in Madrid at the start of the ‘80s, even though a large part of it is set in the Madrid of that time. What interests me about that historic moment is the explosion of freedom that Spain was experiencing, as opposed to the obscurantism and repression of the ‘60s. The early ‘80s are, therefore, the ideal setting for the protagonists, now adults, to be masters of their destinies, their bodies and their desires.
The film is not a comedy, although there is humor (Javier Cámara’s character), nor is it a children’s musical although there are children singing. It is a “film noir”, or at least that is how I like to think of it.
Fade to Black
Black are the priests’ soutanes, black are the nights in the pupils’ dormitory, black are the characters’ destinies, and “noir” is the genre to which the story told in “Bad Education” belongs. Black, in French, in recognition of the country that rescued the genre, defined its identifying signs and encouraged its development as a major genre. Film noir (like almost all the noble genres) adapts easily to being mixed with other genres, provided the narrative has that breath of fatality without which black would be grey.
The noir genre mixes well with melodrama in its toughest form (“Leave Her To Heaven,” by John M. Stahl, “Mildred Pearce,” by Michael Curtiz), with the most desperate romanticism (“Laura,” by Preminger, “La Sirène du Mississippi,” by Truffaut, “Out of the Past,” by Jacques Tourneur, etc), social criticism (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Vázquez Montalbán) or the terror-without-monsters, that is, the kind that comes straight from the human heart (“Human Desire,” in its two versions, Fritz Lang, whenever he works in this genre, “Fallen Angel” and “Angel Face,” both by Preminger, etc.) or the melancholy of the violent, if a genre can be assigned to this characteristic (Nicholas Ray: “In A Lonely Place,” “On Dangerous Ground”). The noir genre even mixes well with the Western. That is Clint Eastwood’s greatest contribution as a director (“Unforgiven” is really a thriller and “Mystic River” a Western).
In film noir there may not be policemen or guns or even physical violence, but there must be lies and fatality, qualities that are normally embodied by a woman: the “femme fatale.” The “femme fatale” (she isn’t indispensable in the genre, but she is one of its great icons) is a woman aware of her power of seduction, hypo tense, so she won’t be easily upset, who has lost her scruples and has no interest in recovering them. For her, sex is not a source of pleasure, but one of pain for everyone else.
In “Bad Education”, the “femme fatale” is an “enfant terrible,” the character played by Gael García Bernal, who strictly follows the examples of Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Greer, Jean Simmons (“Angel Face”), Joan Bennett (“Scarlet Street”), Ann Dvorak, Mary Windsor, Lizabeth Scott, Veronica Lake and so many other curses in the shape of a woman.
Cinema As A Refuge and As A Mirror
I like to think that cinemas are a good refuge for murderers and for the lonely. I also like to consider the screen as a mirror of the future.
Juan and Mr. Berenguer (Gael García Bernal and Lluis Homar) go into a cinema to kill time, after having killed someone. The evening is growing black for three reasons: the sky threatens a storm and the cinema where the two characters end up is showing two gems of French film noir, “La bête humaine” (Renoir) and “Thérèse Raquin” (Marcel Carné), both based on novels by Zola. The two films involve situations similar to that of the two men who are watching them as they wait for the Mediterranean night to fall.
As they leave the cinema, Mr. Berenguer, devastated, complains: “It’s as if all the films were talking about us.” (The big screen as a mirror of the spectators).
There is another sequence in which fiction and reality come face to face, like the spectator and the cinema screen. When Mr. Berenguer visits Enrique Goded’s set. In front of the camera he sees Father Manolo, or rather, Mr. Berenguer before he cast off his habits, in the film written by one of his pupils (Ignacio) and directed by another (Enrique). Mr. Berenguer can contemplate his past, narrated and deformed by the two pupils who, years earlier, had been his victims.
The narrative reflects itself and revolves around various visits. Even the scene that the two boys see in the cinema is a visit, to a convent (Sara Montiel, after living through an indescribable destiny in “Esa Mujer” returns to the convent where she took the habits). Doubleness, duplicity, and mirrors that multiply deform what they see. Enrique Goded decides to film the short story written by his friend Ignacio, which triples the versions we are seeing of the same story: the “real” story, the one told by Ignacio in his short story, inspired by and fantasized from the real story, and the one Enrique adapts from the short story and visualizes as a film.
“Bad Education” is the story of a triple triangle (the two pupils and the school principal), multiple stories that, like Russian dolls, are hidden inside each other and are really only one.
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Gael Garcia Bernal as Angel / Juan / Zahara and Javier Camara as Paquito in Bad Education.