Bad Education

The passion according to Sara Montiel

There is a crucial moment in Bad Education. While fleeing from Father Manolo’s harassment, the boy Ignacio falls violently to the ground and hits his head on a rock. Turning to his pursuer — and to us — a red line begins to run across his forehead, and it is then that the image, still in motion, splits in two. The child’s voice tells us: ‘A trickle of blood divided my face in two. And I had a premonition that the same thing would happen to my life.’ In this extravagant cinematic meiosis, the crack in the flesh is also a duplication: on each side of the frame, it is still Ignacio’s recognisable face looking at us. From the hole that forms between the two halves, the face of the executioner emerges from the darkness. One face emerges from the insides of another face. Another image is torn from the innermost part of a broken image. In this dance of overlapping surfaces, the substance of Bad Education is made up of fissures, doubles and abysses.

The last frame of the opening credits, which names Pedro Almodóvar as the screenwriter and director of the film we are about to see, is followed by a poster on the wall that reads: ‘script and direction: Enrique Goded’. This is the first duplicate, but the furore of deferred repetitions is only just beginning. In Madrid in 1980, a successful director is sought out by an aspiring actor who claims to be a former love from his religious school days. He has in his hands a short story that could be made into a film. In the mise en abyme that begins, Bad Education splits in two: the film being made detaches itself from its making, duplicating itself in the autobiographical narrative that inspires it. Within the story there is another story, but perhaps there are still others that we do not yet know. The screen’s proportions are reduced to accommodate the story within the story and frame the abyss, but there will be no safe haven for the viewer who moves on a tightrope between biography and invented memory, between fiction and lies.

Each character in Bad Education splits to duplicate themselves into at least two. Enrique Serrano is Enrique Goded. Father Manolo is also Mr. Berenguer. Ángel Andrade is Ignacio Rodríguez, and he is Zahara, and perhaps even another. Bad Education is a melodrama obsessed with melodrama, and it borrows from that tradition a particular attraction to the figure of the double. It is the woman who starts her life over with another name to escape her fate (The Woman of the Port, by Arcady Boytler), it is the twin sister who usurps the place of the other (The Other, by Roberto Gavaldón), it is Vertigo before Vertigo and Rebecca after Rebecca (Beyond Oblivion, by Hugo del Carril). Faced with this art of duplicates, Almodóvar could not help but devote himself to exponential multiplication: Bad Education is a spiral of deceptive appearances, of images within images, of unsuspected resonances — here, there is nothing more similar to the art of drag queens than the iconography of Catholic priests.

The obsession with melodrama diva Sara Montiel, which has shaped the protagonist’s cinephile education since his school days, permeates the film’s form. In That Woman (1969), the film by Mario Camus that fills the screen of the village cinema during the sexual initiation of Ignacio and Enrique, Sara is a disruptive force that stands out from the greyness of traditional Spain with her extravagant dresses, her unusual hairstyles, her garish colours — and her gaze that pierces the camera lens, staring straight into the abyss of our eyes. Almodóvar draws inspiration from these visual ruptures imposed by Sara’s presence, which distort the codes of the genre — to redouble them, embracing the vertigo of a passionate meta-melodrama. The absurdity of the sets, the omnipresence of music, the bizarre twists and turns mark the coherence of an appropriation that is self-aware, but without a hint of mockery: Almodóvar is as devoted to Sara as Ángel, who spends months studying one of her imitators.

If sociological theory says that the sentimental education of melodrama sought to teach women servitude, the cinematic fury of María Félix also inspired them to be mistresses, barbarians, devils. In the same vein, the disruptive exuberance of Sara Montiel could only teach Almodóvar the art of extravagance and excess. Just as, in the opening scene, the purple colour of her dress invents, in the cinema, a dissident love and a way of living outside the norm, the director learns from the diva to transgress the rules — moral and aesthetic — and to plunge into the abyss. In the end, what remains is the vertiginous leap, the zoom on the word ‘pasión’.