Pedro Almodóvar has had a remarkable career — and it just goes on being remarkable. First there were his youthful outrages, such as Pepi, Luci, Bom (famous nun-urination scene), then the triumphs of his first maturity — Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
After that there was a bit of a lull, with movies such as Kika and High Heels being amusing but a bit vapid, before the Spanish maestro began to hit the peaks of his second great period.
This kicked off with The Flower of My Secret in 1995 and has since continued, in an unbroken stream, through Live Flesh, All About My Mother, i, and now — best of them all — Bad Education.
In these later works, Almodóvar deploys all his myriad styles and conceits, and he is as oddball and blackly humorous as ever, but his work is now suffused with a deeper humanity. If his works are often tragicomedies, the ”tragi” part has been given a new emphasis since The Flower of My Secret — unlike Kika, say, where rape is played for laughs.
And yet, in these recent tragicomedies, for all their freight of human emotion and the awareness of how tragedy can strike us, Almodóvar manages everything with a considerable lightness of touch. His work seems to have become brighter and airier, yet at the same time much deeper. How on earth is this done? Is it a product of his brightly coloured camp sensibility broadening to embrace the world?
Almodóvar’s plots are often soap opera, but the means are highly arty — movies-within-movies, complex flashback structures, and so on. In Bad Education, for instance, we have a filmmaker, Enrique (Fele MartÃÂnez), who is obviously not a million miles from Almodóvar himself, though also not identical.
Enrique is approached by a man who identifies himself as the dearest friend of his schooldays. It is not going too far to say the two had some kind of love relationship, perhaps the most profound of Enrique’s life. This man, Angel ((Gael GarcÃÂa Bernal), as he chiooses to be called, offers Enrique a story he has written, which he hopes will be turned into a film script. It is about the time they spent together in a Catholic school under the lustful eyes (and hands) of a certain priest.
Enrique, who has been scouring the newspapers for bizarre news items that might make a good script, now has been given a story that very much concerns him and his own life. The complex tale of Bad Education plays itself out from there in the form of movies or possible movies made by Enrique, and in flashbacks that may or may not be the real story of what happened.
If that makes Bad Education sound hard to follow, fear not. Almodóvar is so adept at what has become his own particular kind of multi-level storytelling that it all feels quite natural — not to mention gripping. He is interested in the way the boundary between fact and fiction keeps shifting and dissolving, and he uses that constant motion to give Bad Education successive layers of meaning (and irony).
Almodóvar is as concerned with what happens to us as he is concerned with how we narrate what happens to us — how we tell our stories and those of the people close to us, and how that complicates and changes who we are. Perhaps that’s what makes him such a supreme storyteller. He is capable of sympathy even for his vilest characters, and he lets them tell their own stories.
As always in Almodóvar, the figure of the transvestite is central. In Bad Education Almodóvar has the cheerful gall to put Bernal, heart-throb of the hispanophone cinema, into wigs, make-up, skirts and stockings (and that’s by no means the least of what Almodóvar subjects him to). Bernal’s character is the bearer of the story that sets the whole narrative of Bad Education going, but he is also, as he avows up-front, an actor finding a role — he’s not so much a character as characters, plural.
Insofar as we are all actors, telling our stories and performing our roles, we are also, in Almodóvar’s terms, transvestites: our very identities are performances. Of course it’s true that Almodóvar simply loves trannies, but they are also his symbol of the interplay of appearance and reality — of, in fact, the deeper truth to be discovered in the heart of the lie.