I adored Bad Education, even though I don’t think it’s Almodovar‘s best film. (I didn’t like it quite as much as his previous film, Talk To Her). It’s pretty much pure melodrama, with less humor/absurdity than many of his earlier films. Of course, you could argue that drag queens in Almodovar are always campy and absurd, at the same time that they are people of passion and pathos; but here the balance is more towards the passion and pathos, and less toward the absurdity, than in many of his previous films. This may be, in part, because Bad Education is one of Almodovar’s most overtly gay films — all the relationships in the film are between men, for the first time, I think, since Law of Desire in 1987. But then, one of the great things about Almodovar is that he has never made any distinction between gay and straight passions/relationships: all of them are equally queer, all equally delirious and obsessive. This is what’s utopian about his movies. It’s remarkable how he can create this sort of equality, even as all the passions he depicts are intransitive, i.e. not reciprocal, not fully reciprocated. Almodovar is fully aware of the power relations that flow from different privileges of gender and sexuality; it’s not by ignoring these, but precisely through them, that he creates sympathy for the madly-in-love obsessives who populate his films. The pedophile priest in Bad Education, however, is not quite as exalted as the protagonist of Talk To Her, who impregnates the woman of his dreams while she is in a years-long coma; Bad Education is a somewhat colder film. The melodrama turns more on mystery and disguise than on thwarted passion, and so the film is less about extravagance than it is about mirrorings of situations, doublings of identity, and life imitating art imitating life. All the characters are troubled, but Gael Garcia Bernal’s hustler/actor/drag queen remains opaque to the end — he’s a performer, everything he does is masked, and when the masks drop it’s only to reveal other masks. Resolving the melodrama — or at least revealing the mystery — in this self-consciously aestheticized way is Almodovar’s alternative, I guess, to the tragedy of passion (equally aestheticized, but far less archly self-conscious) depicted in Talk To Her. All in all, it’s quite a distance to this film from the campy excess of the early films (What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Matator, and Law of Desire) that first led me to fall in love with Almodovar nearly two decades ago. But I won’t endorse either of the cliches that usually come up on occasions like this: I think neither that Almodovar has matured and deepened his art, nor that he has abandoned his early radicalism and excess for mainstream tastefulness and dullness. The world has changed and Almodovar has changed with the world, which is why he has moved from low-budget camp to slick art-house fare, or from emulating early John Waters to emulating mid-period Vincente Minnelli. In a real sense, it is precisely through these shifts that Almodovar has kept alive the lovely utopianism that I mentioned earlier: a utopianism not of Blochian hope, nor of Adornoesque disalienation, nor even really of surrealist freedom of the imagination, but rather just of the singularity, stubbornness, and sheer stupidity of passion itself, its refusal to resign itself to the facts, or to pay heed to the counsels of good sense, the demands of self-preservation, and the glittering allurements of commodity fetishism. This is perhaps why Almodovar sets his relatively disillusioned narrative in the early 1980s, that extraordinary moment of flowering for Spanish culture after the death of Franco, when Almodovar himself got his start as a filmmaker, and when both democracy and gay liberation seemed to promise so much more than the bourgeois normalization that is legacy for Spain (and for some other countries, mostly in western Europe, that are happily less benighted than the United States) today.
Bad Education
I adored Bad Education, even though I don’t think it’s Almodovar‘s best film. (I didn’t like it quite as much as his previous film, Talk To Her). It’s pretty much pure melodrama, with less humor/absurdity than many of his earlier films. Of course, you could argue that drag queens in Almodovar are always campy and absurd, at the same time that they are people of passion and pathos; but here the balance is more towards the passion and pathos, and less toward the absurdity, than in many of his previous films. This may be, in part, because Bad Education is one of Almodovar’s most overtly gay films — all the relationships in the film are between men, for the first time, I think, since Law of Desire in 1987. But then, one of the great things about Almodovar is that he has never made any distinction between gay and straight passions/relationships: all of them are equally queer, all equally delirious and obsessive. This is what’s utopian about his movies. It’s remarkable how he can create this sort of equality, even as all the passions he depicts are intransitive, i.e. not reciprocal, not fully reciprocated. Almodovar is fully aware of the power relations that flow from different privileges of gender and sexuality; it’s not by ignoring these, but precisely through them, that he creates sympathy for the madly-in-love obsessives who populate his films. The pedophile priest in Bad Education, however, is not quite as exalted as the protagonist of Talk To Her, who impregnates the woman of his dreams while she is in a years-long coma; Bad Education is a somewhat colder film. The melodrama turns more on mystery and disguise than on thwarted passion, and so the film is less about extravagance than it is about mirrorings of situations, doublings of identity, and life imitating art imitating life. All the characters are troubled, but Gael Garcia Bernal’s hustler/actor/drag queen remains opaque to the end — he’s a performer, everything he does is masked, and when the masks drop it’s only to reveal other masks. Resolving the melodrama — or at least revealing the mystery — in this self-consciously aestheticized way is Almodovar’s alternative, I guess, to the tragedy of passion (equally aestheticized, but far less archly self-conscious) depicted in Talk To Her. All in all, it’s quite a distance to this film from the campy excess of the early films (What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Matator, and Law of Desire) that first led me to fall in love with Almodovar nearly two decades ago. But I won’t endorse either of the cliches that usually come up on occasions like this: I think neither that Almodovar has matured and deepened his art, nor that he has abandoned his early radicalism and excess for mainstream tastefulness and dullness. The world has changed and Almodovar has changed with the world, which is why he has moved from low-budget camp to slick art-house fare, or from emulating early John Waters to emulating mid-period Vincente Minnelli. In a real sense, it is precisely through these shifts that Almodovar has kept alive the lovely utopianism that I mentioned earlier: a utopianism not of Blochian hope, nor of Adornoesque disalienation, nor even really of surrealist freedom of the imagination, but rather just of the singularity, stubbornness, and sheer stupidity of passion itself, its refusal to resign itself to the facts, or to pay heed to the counsels of good sense, the demands of self-preservation, and the glittering allurements of commodity fetishism. This is perhaps why Almodovar sets his relatively disillusioned narrative in the early 1980s, that extraordinary moment of flowering for Spanish culture after the death of Franco, when Almodovar himself got his start as a filmmaker, and when both democracy and gay liberation seemed to promise so much more than the bourgeois normalization that is legacy for Spain (and for some other countries, mostly in western Europe, that are happily less benighted than the United States) today.