Bad Education [2004]

Academy Award winning filmmaker Pedro Almod var takes a look at his own adolescence as well as confronting the issue of sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church in this stylish thriller, which was chosen to open the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Bad Education narrates the reunion of two young men in early 80s Madrid, as the city starts to breathe a new air of freedom. Fifteen years earlier, in the darkness of a Catholic school, the two young men had discovered sensuality and a common hatred of the priests from whom they received their ?bad education?. Now, in the new and liberated Madrid, both men ? a film-maker and an aspiring actor ? revisit their early years together. As they try to uncover the truth about themselves, each other and the other characters in their story, they realise that things and people are not as they first seem. Writer/director Pedro Almod var's dark, sexy Hitchcock homage is his best work since his Oscar-winning All About My Mother, and deepened by a sun-dappled sadness. Handsome, enigmatic  angel (Gael Garca Bernal) arrives at the Spanish movie offices of director Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) and happily proclaims that he's actually Enrique's long-lost school chum Ignacio--an announcement that is both less than convincing and more than it seems. A novice actor, angel pitches a semi-autobiographical screenplay in which he's determined to star, a revenge-laden reflection of the doomed love he and Enrique shared as boys before a paedophile priest cruelly intervened. The script, and the lost days it recalls, carefully unfurls into a series of brooding movies-within-movies and memories-inside-memories, which allow the sensual, multiple-role-playing Bernal to give the performance of his young career--among other things, he makes a stunningly convincing drag queen--and Almod var the opportunity to suggest, movingly, that people will pay any price to ensure that their stories are told. -- Steve Wiecking