Film of the week

Lipstick on your scholar

Pedro Almodóvar's intriguing new masterpiece is set in a school, explores everyone's sexuality and is a story within a story. Oh, and it's totally mainstream

Bad Education
(105 mins, 15)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar; Starring Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara

In the past a film was not expected to go into profit until it had been in distribution for months and new directors had the chance to gain experience over time, discovering personal style through increasingly ambitious projects. Now movies have to turn a profit in their first couple of weeks of distribution and film-makers in mainstream cinema are expected to produce popular masterpieces, first time out. It is therefore encouraging to observe the career of Pedro Almodóvar, who arrived in Madrid in the early 1970s and had a central role in the heady era that followed Franco's death in 1975. He worked on comic books, took part in political cabaret and experimental theatre and made subversive underground movies, before entering and helping to revitalise Spain's film industry in 1980.

Combining in-your-face provocation with an ever increasing stylishness derived from classical Hollywood pictures and high fashion, Almodóvar has directed a film virtually every year. By his mid-forties he had reached a kind of maturity, turning from enfant terrible to accomplished maestro with a series of films that bring together formal brilliance, immaculate plotting, generosity of spirit and emotional power.

Live Flesh in 1997 was followed by All About My Mother and Talk to Her, which were respectively the last cinematic masterpiece of the 20th century and the first masterpiece of the 21st. Now we have Bad Education, as remarkable in its way as the preceding pair, though perhaps less moving.

It begins with credits that recall American movies of the 1950s and 1960s, evocative collages of newspapers, pin-ups, old photographs, in shifting blocks of colour. They are the kind of thing we associate with the designer Saul Bass and the movies of Blake Edwards.

The accompanying music using nerve-jangling strings evokes the scores written by Bernard Herrmann for Hitchcock. This is appropriate, for the picture is set in the 1960s and 1970s; it is a sort of thriller; and the song 'Moon River' from Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's plays a peculiarly poignant role.

The picture is like a series of Chinese boxes or receding confessionals and begins in the 1980s at the Madrid office of a successful, openly gay director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), who is searching the tabloids to find a subject for his next picture. We are invited to see him as a version of the young Almodóvar.

Suddenly a bearded young man (the mercurial Gael García Bernal from Amores perros and Y tu mamá también ) arrives. He announces himself as Ignacio, the director's closest friend at a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s, whom he has not seen for 16 years. He was a budding writer then, but is now an actor in a third-rate touring company and calls himself Angel.

Angel has brought with him a story called 'The Visit' that he thinks would make a great movie and leaves it for Enrique to read. It is, he says, a truthful rendering of their lives at school, followed by a fictional second half of the lives they might subsequently have led. At school, it transpires, the boys were attracted to each other in an innocently homoerotic manner, but an abusive paedophile teacher, Father Manolo, who lusted after Ignacio, arranged for Enrique to be expelled. In Angel's story the two meet again when Enrique has become a commonplace family man in a provincial town and Ignacio a junkie transvestite calling himself Zahara, who sets out to exact a revenge on Manolo.

Enrique the director is fascinated by 'The Visit' and decides to film it. But problems arise when Angel insists on playing the transvestite, Zahara. From then on the film flits back and forth between the making of the movie and the schooldays in the 60s, with flashbacks within flashbacks, and scenes set in Madrid, Galicia, Barcelona and Valencia.

In 'The Visit', Enrique and Ignacio masturbate each other while watching a romantic movie featuring the Spanish star Sara Montiel. While preparing the movie in so-called 'real life' they become lovers. But is Angel really Ignacio? Where does the seemingly fictional character of the transvestite Zahara derive from?

Well, there is a whole other story that both answers these questions and complicates the film. It is indeed a dazzling piece of work, beautifully staged, continually fascinating and lucid in a hall-of-mirrors way. In what seems like a commentary on Almodóvar's view of the relationship between life and cinema, a conspiratorial couple involved in planning a homicide emerge from taking refuge in their local cinema. It's Film Noir Week (posters of Double Indemnity, The Killers and Thérèse Raquin are on display in the foyer) and as they emerge, one of them says: 'It's as if all the films were talking about us'.

But this is far more than a smart melodrama for movie buffs. Almodóvar involves us with the characters and, far from being a conventional attack on the horrors of life in the old-fashioned Catholic education referred to in the title, the movie makes the school look moderately attractive. Turning the tables on us in a very clever manner, it ultimately invites us to find Manolo a sympathetic, if tragic, figure.

There are two remarkable aspects to Bad Education . First, it differs strikingly from the director's previous films in one significant respect. Women are usually prominent, indeed central, and treated with great sympathy in his other works. All About My Mother is dedicated to 'all mothers and to all actresses who have played mothers'. Here women are virtually absent.

Second, this is not an art-house picture appealing to a niche audience and Almodóvar has pulled off an amazing coup.

He has made a mainstream movie where all the characters are gay or bisexual, yet it is unlikely to strike a popular audience as odd, repugnant or problematic. This is a tribute to his artistry and a revealing comment on the changing tastes and mores of the western world.

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