Bad Education (La Mala educación), directed by Pedro Almodóvar and based on a short story that he wrote in the early 1970s, explores the limits of love and sexual passion. The film begins, captioned 1980, with a gratuitous scene, presumably calculated to scare straights out of the audience so that gays and their friends will enjoy the emotional depths without inhibitions: A drag queen performer, Ángel Andrade (played by Gael García Bernal), throws a rose at a leather-jacketed inebriated hunk from the stage and later scores when he falls asleep in bed. The plot begins when a bearded Ángel knocks on the door of twentysomething film director-writer Enrique Goded (played by Fele Martínez), claiming to be his long-lost boyfriend Ignacio Rodríguez. Ángel says that he is a budding actor who wants to play a role in a film. Carrying a manuscript, "La Visita," he asks Enrique to read the story. Soon, he calls Enrique and begs to play the part of Zahara in the film that can be made from the story. Enrique knows that Ángel is not Ignacio, who would be older, but he is fascinated by the story and only mildly interested in Ángel as a potential sex bottom. Flashbacks identify the relationship between preteens Enrique (played by Raúl García Forniero) and Ignacio (played by Nacho Pérez) as well as advances from a schoolmaster, Father Manolo (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho), toward Ignacio at a Catholic boarding school in the early 1960s. One night, while Father Manolo is on the prowl for Ignacio, he encounters Enrique and Ignacio together in a locked bathroom stall. Ignacio decides to submit to the schoolmaster's sexual demands in order to prevent him from expelling Enrique, but Father Manolo doublecrosses him, and Enrique and Ignacio never see each other again. Enrique, now a young film director is eager to read the manuscript, as he has a case of writer's block. What he reads appears to describe the fate of Ignacio, who at some point becomes a drag queen and a heroin addict. The story, if true, reveals that an older Ignacio, dressed as a drag queen named Zahara, visits Father Manolo to blackmail him. Enrique then is eager to separate fact from fiction, so he travels to Ignacio's home in Galicia, where he learns that Ignacio died a few years earlier and that his younger brother Juan is indeed an actor. Although Enrique at first wants nothing to do with an obvious impostor, he changes his mind, agrees to cast Ángel (Juan) as Zahara, and regularly taking advantage of Ángel's desire to submit his body to him, a submission that Ángel later hints could go much farther into kinky sex. However, Enrique's adaptation of the story to the screen differs from the manuscript's ending. Enrique has Father Manolo and a fellow priest murder Ignacio in order to stop what could become a never-ending blackmail scam. The twists and turns of the plot thicken even more when a publisher, Manuel Berenguer (played by Lluís Homar), shows up on the last day of the filming. Confessing that he is the former Father Manolo, he says that Ignacio did indeed write "La Visita," but as a blackmail tool in order to pay for a heroin habit. Berenguer has a different version of the events leading up to Ignacio's death, and of course at the very end of the film so does Ángel, thus leaving filmviewers with a puzzle to solve. What is not a mystery is that the film lambastes the Catholic Church, not because the director was a victim of a pedophile, but for miseducation, sexual abuse of classmates, and for corporal punishment. One might add the church's support of the dictator Francisco Franco. MH
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