A very bad education, indeed

A splashy, elegantly-crafted affair is acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's latest (and possibly most autobiographical) work Bad Education. The film follows the typical trajectory of the classic film noir. Our hero meets a femme fatale—only this femme isn’t a femme—and his life is subsequently spun into a cinematic whirlwind.

The protagonist is a young art film director searching for the subject of his next film. Conveniently, a long-lost “friend” stops by and offers him the perfect screenplay for his next movie. The movie's controversy comes in as the proposed film is based on the two characters’ scandalous relationship in a Catholic grade school, particularly, the actions of a wayward priest who, of course, abuses one of the boys.

Two unexpected reveals boomerang the film and completely transform everything we’ve learned thus far. Despite the smart delivery of the plot twists, the surprising turn-of-events manifest themselves as a bad thing in the film.

Almodovar’s forte is spraying paint across the cinematic canvas, creating some of the strangest yet realistic and incredibly vivid characters ever to strut across the silver screen. He’s especially adept at conjuring up memorably tragic women whether it be a distraught mother or a struggling drug addict. A bad sign in Bad Education is the fact that there are no female leads.

Instead, for the duration of the movie, he fails considerably to deliver anything close to an important character; the film's people are wooden and superficially-thin.

When the secrets are unveiled and the plot kicks into high gear, it's a betrayal to the audience. Everything learned about the characters that we care about changes, and while at first glance the flip-flop is satisfyingly rendered, upon closer examination, the characters finish up as faceless—or masked—personages without a shred of real purpose or motivation. Sure one of the characters might've perpetrated a vicious crime, but if the viewer can't imagine the character doing it or understand why he did it, it's not a great movie.

Almodovar who is usually so adept at managing the conflicting personalities and agendas of his movie's citizens fails miserably here. Mostly because of this, Bad Education, Almodovar’s first noir, is separated from the rest of his recent masterpieces (see Talk To Her, All About My Mother, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown); it’s the almost a success work among a collection of poignant, irresistible cinematic leviathans.