Pedro Almodovar and

the New Politics of Spain

by Geoff Pingree
hen spectators lined up in Madrid
tor the Spanish premiere of Pedro
Ahnodovar's new film. Bad Education, they were mot by an angry crowd
that pelted them with tomatoes and eggs.
The outrage stemmed not from the movie'.s
potentially vohtilc subjectthe sexual
abuse of young boys by the clergy to whom
they were entrusted-but from statements
that Almodovar himself had made a few
days earlier. In response to the March 11th
bombings and to the ruling Popular Part)''s
initial attempts to cast blame tor those
attacks on the Basque terrorist group ETA,
the filmmaker raisedif somewhat provocativelylegitimate questions about the
fairness of the government's actions in the
days before the country's elections. In the
controversy that ensued, art and political life
merged abruptly as Almodovar's most
mature film met a Spain grappling with its
own maturitv as a democriitic nation.

Typical of much of the director's work.

Bad Education's encounters and tensions are
intensely personal, its characters and situations saturated with autobiographical references. Yot the movie's tone is uncharacteristically dark, and its mode of resolution
reflectsmore precisely than any ot his previous filmsthe particular society and culture for and about which Almodovar speaks
(he recently told The New York limes [September 5, 20()4|, "Everything 1 am is a
response to this place [Spain]"). While Had
Education may be his most intimately playful and privately sclt-conscious movie, it is
also perhaps his most politically relevant.
At first glance. Bad Education shares
much with Almodovar's earlier motion pictures^complex, often hilarious dramas featuring transgressive protagonists and unpredictable outcomes. This film, too, includes
flamboyant drag queens both lovable and
dangerous, emotional high jinks, and char-

acters in thrall to their passions. But by the

time it has reached its conclusion. Bad Education has acquired a portentous gravity seldom evident in his previous movies.
Age is at the root of this distinctly serious
tone, formore than anything elseBad
Education is a work of, and about, maturation. It is first a painful story about growing
up for its central characters: Ignacio, a sexually abused boy who becomes a transsexual
and struggles with drug addiction; his
younger brother Juan, an aspiring actor who
atlcmpts to succeed in the film business by
selling the story of Ignacio's relationship
with the priest who abused him; Enrique,
Ignacio's schoolmate and first love and now
the film director to whom Rian tries to sell
Ignacio's story; and the priest himself.
Father Manolo, who leaves the church to
seek a new life and identity. It is also a reckless and exuberant coming of age tale for
late 1970s and early 198()s Spain, a long-

Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez, left), a filmmaker, meets Ignacio {Gael Garcia Bernal), an old schoolmate, in Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education.

4 CINEASTE, Winter 2004

repressed society newly released from the

strictures of Franco's dictatorship into the
moral and cultural upheaval of the movida.^
And it is a work that itself, along with its
director, has had to come of ageevolving
for thirty years before Almodovar was able
to realize it as a film.
Indeed, in his prologue to the recently
published screenplay, the director explains
that Bad Education has been with him since
1973, an "obsession" and "refuge" to which
he has continually turned whenever he has
found time away from his other projects.
Written first to avenge his Catholic school
education and the priests who administered
it, Bad Educationlong titled The Visits-is
the only t~ilm that Almodovar claims to have
felt no pressure to complete. "The passage of
time has been good to Bad Education," he
says, as "each new version that I wrote took
me further away from the original idea, and
my perspective became more complete, less
schematic, richer and darker" (Coicccion
Kspiral, 2004, 11-13}. This process of ripening into darkness, obviously crucial to the
liuman characters Almodovar creates in the
movie, seems centra! as well to Almodovar
himself as an evolving filmmaker, and to
Spain as a time and placeboth within the
film, and in the present moment.

this torturous structure underscores the

existential murkiness that descends on the
characters as they confront their complex
and contradictory selves and attempt to
realize their genuine desires. What may be
most memorable about the characters'
struggles to examine and accept themselvesto somehow matureis that each
remains messily, tragically unresolved.
Thus a work that is beautiful to the eye
stunningly staged, lit, and shot, as lovely to
look at as either of Almotiovar's last two
movies, All About My Mother and Talk to
Heris not a beautiful story. But ann>ng all
those the director has told, it is the most seasoned, and perhaps most important.

Almodovar often speaks of his admiration

for redemptive rituals-religious or not
and of his wish to find redemption for his
films' characters. Likewise, the theme of
redemption appears regularly in writing
about his films. But Bad Education may be
the first tnovie in which the director
redeems his characters by releasing them to
the agony of their own wisdom, the first
movie in which he frames redemption itself
as a process of maturity through suffering.
For the filmmaker, then, the work's darkness seems, ironically, to represent a new
horizon, one that is, if not hopeful, then full
of meaningful possibility.
And this sense of pcissibility extends

ut Had Education's
exquisitely
amassed gloom is not, finally, a
nihilistic or even pessimistic gesture.
The acquisition of wisdom and maturity is
often depicted, especially in narrative film,
as a progression towards clarity and simplicity. But the laws of human growth are different in the world of this moviesomething
first intimated in Bad Edtication'v, exceedingly complex narrative structure. What may be
most obvious upon first viewing the film, in
fact, is how complicated and confusing is its
plot. This confusion makes the movie's initial appeal primarily visualbecause the
images are beautiful and striking, yes, but
also because actor Gael Garcia Bernal
impersonates at least three of the movie's
centra! characters, a visual match that offers
the first solid clues about what is going on, and
w!iat might lie ahead.

The question "Who is he?" moves to the

fore, preceding more conventional questions about motivation and action, and Garcia Bernal's reliable presence, in multiple
characters and worlds, soon makes clear that
this is a movie within a movie, a story inside
a story. But this particular layered narrative
structure, something Almodovar nurtured
for over three decades, seems less intended
to impress or confuse than to set up a particularand, for the director, newkind of
conclusion. Certainly the film's elaborate
form, which heightens, and sometimes provides, powerful moments of intrigue, helps
Bad Education succeed, plotwise, as what the
director has, on his website and elsewhere,
called a work of llhii noir. But more than
infusing the external action with suspense.

Pedro Almodovar prepares a scene with Gael Garcia Bernal for Bad Education.

CINEASTE, Winter 2004 5

Angel/Juan/Zahara {Gael Garcia Bernal) with Mr. Berenguer (Luis Homar) in Bad Education (photo by Diego Lopez Calvin)

beyond the world of the film itself. Almodovar's friend Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of
Charles Chaplin and granddaughter ot
Eugene O'Neill, and an established figure in
Spani.sh cinema herself, told El Piiis (March
28, 2004) that there arc at least two Pedro
Almoddvarsthe humorou.s one that
resembles her father, and the dark one that
is similar to her grandfather, if Almod6var's
regular use of character impersonation in
his past movies has been, as he has
explained, a way to articulate his ditlercnt
selves, then his latest film may signal a significant turn towards himself as an artist.
For though it features the act of impersonation as much as any of his movies. Bad
Education engages with it in a different way,
piercing the essential paradox of this process
by revealing how acts of impersonation yield
both self-know!edge and anguish.
Continuously unraveling. Had Education
is a movie that both heightens and undermines tbe process of impersonation. As it
unfolds, the film's concentric narratives and
blurred characters shift the emphasis from
"Who is he?" to "What will he become?"
Despite its self-conscious, layered structure,
and its complex mixture of fiction and reality, the movie is not just a story in which
highly idiosyncratic characters transgress
social boundaries at every level (something
we have come to expect from Ainiodovar],

6 CINEASTE, Winter 2004

but also a world in which such characters

are left to confront the inner conflicts that
largely motivate their idiosyncrasies. And so
Bad Hdncatioii-the director's first film to
tocus exclusively on men and boys, on their
relationships with each other and with
themselvesbecomes a type of confession;
examining the consequences of characters
moving "fictionally" among the movie's
"real worlds,'" Almodovar signals that he has
adiusted his own relationship with the characters and worlds he creates, and that he has
confronted 3 process of impersonation by
which he has in the past merely dramatized
his own various and conflicting personae.
This gesture gives transformative power
to the film's dark tenor, but it also helps
make sense of the movie's strong autobiographical flavor. For despite Almodovar's
repeated insistence that while his work is
influenced by personal events, it is not autobiographical. Bad Eduauiofi features characters and experiences that appear directly
rooted in his life. Almodovar attended a
parochial boarding school in Hxtremadura
much like the one in the film where Ignacio
and tnrique meet, and he has frequently
admitted being aware of the kind of abuse
that Father Manoio commits. Indeed, it is
hard to imagine the movie's most haunting
sequence-in vvhich the priest first seduces
Ignacio, then discovers Ignacio and Enrique

together in a bathroom stall after curfew,

leverages Ignacio to have sex with him to
save Enrique from being expelled, then
breaks his promise and dismisses Enrique
from the school to eliminate him as a suitorcoming from someone not familiar
with such experiences, for the scenes somehow generate a sympathy for all the characters involved and render the struggle of intimacy
as something both tender and terrifying.
The childhood scenes are set in the late
Sixties, a period that was for Franco the last
act in a nearly forty-year reign, a time in
which the dictator, a master impersonator
himself, maintained a rigidly ordered society
built on the illusion tbat life was simple and
truth clear-cut. But Bad Education's presentday setting, when the protagonists ail, in some
fashion, attempt to confront themselves, is
set just after the end of tbat dictatorship,
when decades of repression gave way, in
some circles at least, to tbe exuberant creative
outburst of the inovida. As it is for Enrique,
tbe inovida was the time in which Aimodovar first began to experiment as a filmmaker.
And Bad Educationdeploying a dense
series of adulatory references to the cinema
of the director's youth (from the Cine
Olympo, to the abundance of old movie
posters, to the appearance, as herself, of
Spanish film legend Sara Montiel)also
echoes Almodovar's own oft-expressed love

of the world of movies. An avowed agnostic,

the director has nonetheless referred to the
cinema as his "god," the altar upon which he
worships and imaginatively embraces
human complexity {Pedro Ahnodovar Interviews, UP of Mississippi. 2004, xiv). Perhaps
it is not a coincidence that he angrily wrote
the first script version of Bad Educalion just
prior to the movida, as Franco's regime was
about to expire, and that he has completed a
much differenta much more mature
tilin now, when Spain is iiself a rapidly
evolving, if messy, democracy.
Indeed, despite the obvious and frequent
similarities between Bad EduciUlou\ events
and characters and Ainiodovar's personal
life, it may be most useful to think of this
work not as autobiography, but as prosopographya collective biography for the
country in which it is set. I-or Bad Education
not only embodies a new kind t)f awareness
(or Ahnodovar himself, it reflects essential
elements of Spain's consciousness as a country. As the director's past fictional characters
have served to dramatize his different selves,
so his evolution as a filmmakerculminating, for the moment, with this latest work
has acted out a process of maturity through
suffering for an audience of film spectators,
and for a nation of democracy-seeking
Spaniards. In this regard. Bad Education
possesses a subtle political dimension not
lound in Ahnodovar's other work, an element that binds him in unprecedented ways
to his own ongoing narrative, and to his
country's evolving history as well.
erhaps it is not too much to suggest
that for decades Spain's own growth
into adulthood, after forty years of
enforced childhood under the authoritarian
rule of l-ranco, has been as unresolved as the
characters' struggles in Bad Education. A
new constitution, forged in 1979, declared
Spain a secular state but undermined that
status with measures that granted special
privileges to the (Catholic Cburch. A military
coup in 1981 nearly brought the entire
democratic experiment to a catastrophic
halt. And the question of what to do with
the country's two regions that long for
greater autonomyCatalonia and the
Basque Countrycontinues to force
Spaniards to think about what 'Spain'
means.

Yet after decades of not talking about its

past, Spain now is nearly obsessed with its
memory of what has happened in the past
seventy years. In part, this is a long-overdue
conversation about the country's 1936 civil
wara conflict whose atrocities were conveniently suppressed not only during; the forty
years of dictatorship, but also in the period
following Franco's death as an implicitly
agreed-upon method for achieving a peaceful transition to democracy. But since the
change in government this past spring, the
return to difficult historical events and
interpretations has expanded to include the

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Gael Garcia Bernal as Angel/Juan/Zahara in Bad Education (photo by Diego Lopez Calvin]

dictatorsbip itself. As recently as 2003, tbt?

Popular Party deputies refused to participate
in a congressional h(>magc to the victinis of
the Franco regime. Now, ono year later, the
Socialist Party has voted to require that
Socialist-governed towns change the names
of all streets still bearing the mark of the old
regime (Spain is full of "Avenidas del (ieneralisimo"). Fatnilies of poiiticLiI prisotiers
condemned by Franco's government for
leftist activities arc dcmatidiiig tbe judicial
rcbabilitiUion of tbeir loved ones. Hooks,
magazine articles, and documentary films
about memoryof exile, of concentration
camps, of tbe everyday injustices and repressions tbat thrived under the dictatorship-
proliferate.
Like Ignacio, F.nrique, Father Manolo.
and the other characters in Bad Edua}lioii,
Spain bas, for some time now, been asking
questions about its identity: Is the country
really a democracy? Does it include all of its
citizens? What does 'Spain' really mean, iind
who gets to define it? 1 he events of midMarch brought this discussion to a bead,
and when Spaniardsintuiting that tbeir
government was lying to thembad tbe
opportunity to test tbe democratic process.
they acted and, in effect, threw the bastards
out. A deep understanding of representative
political government requires more (han
isolated actions, however dramatic, and the

8 CINEASTE, Winter 2004

repercussions of Marcb 2004, alotig witb the

struggle to nurture a truly functional
democracy, will continue to be felt long after
Prime Minister Zapatero has retired. The
bombings were in part possible, after all,
because after decades of being physically and
ideologically closed to the outside world.
Spain bas begun to flourish as an open, ethnicidiy diverse, politically tolerant society.
Yet the country's recent political events,
like tbe film, suggest a growing awareness
that maturity comes through suffering. In El
Pais and elsewhere, Almodovar described
Bad Eiiucation as his attempt to capture the
drutiken freedom of a newly liberated society in tbe post-Franco Spain of tbe early
f9S()s. liut the freedoms embraced hy the
film's characters are hardly joyful or fulfilling, as they simply allow the protagonists to
grapple witb tbeir individual tragedies in
new ways. The same might be said for tbe
strengtb that Spaniards displayed on March
14, when, in respon.se to unprecedented
national tragedy, and to tbeir belief that they
were being deceived, tbey demonstrated a
new maturity of democratic processone
previously tbought fragile and untested
and participated in huge numbers both to
mourn tbe country's loss and to express a
wish for political change.

Bud t.dnaitioii. Bui the elements that distinguish this film from his previous workthe
somber tone, the lack of resolution, the simple message (delivered in a complicated
way) tbat maturity comes from suffering
resonate broadly. Throughout his career
(and in a "self-interview" distributed with
this latest movie in Spain], Almodovar has
spoken of his unwillingness to judge bis
films' characters, of bis desire to help eacb of
tbemno matter bow fallenfnid that bit
of redemption. In Bad Education, Almodovar still .seeks to redeem, but by leavitig his
characters mired witbin unfinished struggles
for deliverance, he explores redemption ot a
different kind. No scores are settled or institutions attacked; while the film revolves
around a priest's act of pedophilia. Father
Manolo too eventually embodies the virtue
of self-acceptance. In Spain today, the public
is sbifting its energies away from evening
accounts from tbe past, towards understanding and transcending it. However
gradual, the country does indeed seem to be
ripening, maturing. Perbaps in tbe crystalline moment of March 1 f th, in that dark
chuid ot suffering, Spaniards saw something
in thetiiselves^and glimpsed a new hope
for national redemption.

Almodovar couid not, of course, have

imagined this outcome while he was making

' Miiifriil's youth-led rfnaissiinte ot vanguard Spanlsfi

an and ciifture in ifie ijtc Seventies and early t'i^htics.