Bad Education

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, June-July, 2005

Pedro Almodovar has often been considered the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Bunuel. Since the early 1980's, Almodovar has been making sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial films charged with a postmodernist perspective. The most recent of his renditions is the exquisite film noir Bad Education, a disturbing but brutally honest depiction of the lives of some not-so-ordinary men in Spain.

There story goes like this: film director Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) gets an unexpected visit from Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), a former prep school classmate that he hasn't seen in a long time. After announcing that he is now an actor looking for work, Ignacio hands Enrique a movie script he wrote based on their days at school, where the priest in charge sexually abused them both. In the movie script, Ignacio's character grows up to become Zahara (also played by Garcia Bernal), a drag queen that works at a club and who attempts to blackmail the priest for his previous faux-pax. When Enrique decides to make the film using Ignacio as the star, the fine between reality and fantasy is blurred and the two inevitably collide.

Critics of this film argue that the plot is too intricate and confusing to follow. We found the movie easy to watch and quite fascinating; Almod6var does and delightful job at keeping us intrigued, not just about what happened at school but as to who Ignacio really is. Wait, did we say too much here? Maybe, maybe not, but it's the process of explaining both the story of these friends and the identity of this curiously mysterious character named Ignacio that make this film a work of art, and in true Almodovar style, it's also what makes the whole movie worth watching. Warning: This film has strong sexual contents and subject matter. The NC-17 version is most definitely the best, but we do not recommend it for younger audiences.

A Film by: Pedro Almodovar

Price: $26.95 / DVD Sony Video

Language: Spanish-w/English subtitles

On sale now at: www.ccvideo.com