Sexual abuse and the Catholic Church during the Franco era – a subject treated with his usual mix of irreverence and seriousness by writer/director Pedro Almodóvar.
Two teenage boys find each other in 1960s Spain – as does the predatorial Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). Separated, years later Enrique (Fele Martinez), now a successful film producer, is approached by wannabe actor, Ángel (Gael García Bernal), with a script of two boys abused at a Catholic school in the 1960s…
Almodóvar trademarks are present throughout – bright colour, up-close camera angles, sexuality and gender fluidity – in this multi-layered melodrama, a melodrama that is less manic, more measured than his films from the 1980s and ’90s (Bad Education followed All About My Mother and Talk To Her). The result is a quiet (relatively speaking) yet barbed, controlled eccentricity weaving Ángel’s script with the ‘real’ of the everyday.
Bad Education opened the 2004 Cannes Film Festival – the first Spanish film to do so.
Rating: 66%
Director: Pedro Almodóvar (Talk To Her, Julieta)
Writer: Pedro Almodóvar (Talk To Her, Julieta)
Main cast: Gael García Bernal (The Motorcyle Diaries, The Kindergarten Teacher), Fele Martinez (Under Therapy, Open Your Eyes), Daniel Giménez Cacho (Zama, Cronos)
An Opinion or Two 