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| Bad Education HOME: movies.zertinet.com |
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In almost a bit of David Lynch insanity, “Bad Education” feels like a blender full of snippets from films you have seen before, mixed up and smeared in a collage that has all the feelings of the familiar with all the spontaneity of the unknown. It’s a movie about memories, but also a movie about movies about memories, and about the making of movies about movies about memories. Confused yet? Not a good sign….we’re just getting started. Much like the work of Quentin Tarantino and the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman, this is a film that rejoices in its own creation, in a beautiful postmodern mix of self-aware disorientation. Here’s an example: We start watching a movie about a movie director, named Enrique, and his distant friend who visits him one day, named Ignacio. They are played by Fele Martinez and Gael Garcia Bemal. Ignacio is an out-of-work actor with a script to give to Enrique, and suddenly the movie compresses into a visualization of the script, and of Enrique’s interpretation of the script. We journey into Enrique’s mind. Clearly this is a story about based on these men’s past, when both Enrique and Ignacio attended Catholic grade school, fell in love, and endured the sexual abuse of their parish priests – a past that both in the present seem to remember differently. But suddenly in that movie, there is a flash forward, and fantasy sequences, and then the story staggers back to the present, where the world of the imaginary and the world of the real have merged together. I find myself lost in this plot description because I’m not completely sure I understand what took place. Yet that’s not really the point now, is it? The joy of the movie is disorienting the viewer so much so that the point becomes the pure, simple pleasure of the experience. Most movies are not about their ultimate destination, but about the routine completion of the expected journey. We know where they’re going, and feel good when the movie takes us where we expect. “Bad Education,” with its dark shadows, questionable characters, ambiguous morals, and a spin of homosexuality that can make the same character into both the amoral man and the mischievous femme fatale, is about not knowing where it’s going, and finally surrendering to its lewd, scary and delicious manipulations. There is a preoccupation here with movies within movies and with the documenting of things on film. Written and directed by the brilliant Pedro Almodovar, who helmed 2002’s “Talk To Her,” which was about a man somehow falling in love with a comatose woman, “Bad Education” is now about how guilt, fear, anger, and sex swirl together in a nightmare of a thriller, and then how we filter and perceive that nightmare through the lens of a camera. It’s an irresistible enigma of a film – kept from being great due to its jittery juxtaposition of stories that are equally comic, dramatic, horrific, exaggerated and absurd - but endlessly engaging as a journey into the mind, its senses and its ability to perceive.
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