Bad Education (2004, Spanish)

First off – an Almodóvar film without any (biological) women? Bad Education is like the inverse of Volver (or vice-versa), at least in casting. Thematically, Education is nearly as concerned with femininity as it is with masculinity.

Starring Gael Garcia Bernal as . . . well, that’s complicated, so let’s just say that he and Fele Martinez anchor the movie, and that Bernal makes a surprisingly pretty girl. The two characters, school friends (and more) from childhood, reconnect in their twenties – Martinez plays a successful film director (at least on the surface, a stand-in for Almodóvar) and Bernal a struggling actor with a talent for writing. What he writes is a story of their past together, intertwined with a parallel present. There are a lot of shifts in Education – time, gender, sexuality, power, reality – and it may in fact be Almodóvar’s most deftly put-together film to date. While the ending felt a bit abrupt, and Martinez’s character often seems disconcertingly above the action, the film as a whole is a powerful examination of the fluidity of identity, and how those things that we think define us incontrovertibly are often less stable than the selves our force of will can create.

Of course, as with everything Almodóvar directs, Education is gorgeously shot. The use of color and music actually reminded me of nothing so much as Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, and I think the two make interesting companion pieces, despite the vast difference in construction. Both simultaneously revere and deconstruct the melodrama formula, using the genre to encode subversive texts in the realm of the familiar and in doing so, forcing a reappraisal of both text and convention.