The Sigla Blog

Drag queens, drug addiction and homosexuality are not high on the average filmmaker’s agenda, let alone when they’re all in the same movie. But then Pedro Almodovar is not exactly James Cameron is he? Sinead Gleeson looks at his career after seeing his new work ‘Bad Education’.

Like his compatriot Picasso, you only have to mention the surname Almodovar and anyone with the vaguest interest in film knows you’re talking about a diminutive Oscar-winning Spanish director. Even those of us not beating a path to the local art house cinema every weekend are probably familiar with the mono-nom of a man hailed as the greatest Spanish filmmaker since Luis Bunuel. Ok so not everyone knows the Spanish titles of his films but mention ‘All About my Mother’ or ‘Talk to Her’ and the euro usually drops. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, he has illuminated many of the darkest corners of modern society and even if his subject matter is not to your liking, there’s no denying that his films affect people. They move, they shock, they might even grate a little, but you don’t forget his work in a hurry.

Pedro Almodovar’s obsession with film began when aged 12 he saw ‘Cat on A Hot Tin Roof’. Educated by Salesians, the former choirboy dreamt of making movies and inhabiting his imagination. At 16, he left the family home and headed for Madrid. This was the era of Franco’s dictatorship and while imagination couldn’t be stifled, Madrid’s film school could - and was closed. Despite rigorous curtailment of the arts, 1960s Madrid was still decadent, bohemian and full of people with the same creative goal as Almodovar. By day he worked for the National phone company to make money to buy the accessory of any aspiring filmmaker, a Super 8 camera. 12 years as a clerk wasn’t without its uses, and it provided the observational material he would one day parody in his films. He wrote short stories and was one half of a piss-take punk duo before finally making his mark with several short films. Building on this small catalogue, his first major film ‘Pepi, Lui, Bom y otors chicas del mondón’ surfaced in 1980. Always irreverent, his debut and many of his early films were camp, outrageous and rubbed the post-Franco conservatives up the wrong way. Works like ‘Dark Habits’ and ‘What have I done to Deserve This’ tackled issues that Spanish society had never discussed - the Catholic Church and the role of women.

The first Almodovar film I ever saw convinced me that the director was a woman. I shuffled into the Lighthouse Cinema with a friend to see ‘Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (which was an early role for Antonia Banderas) as a teenager and loved it. Like his work, it was hugely comic but it raised pertinent questions about female independence, sexuality and desire. It’s glib to say he offsets difficult subject matter with comedy but the fact that he can fuse aspects of drama and humour in the way that he does, defines him as a filmmaker. This is a man who could make a film about terminal illness and it would be sexy, kitsch, funny while still making you depressed. His work is oxymoronic - it’s rounded, yet unpredictable, universal, but niche. For me, he defies classification. Almodovar seems content to smudge the lines of Hollywood melodrama and camp sex farce with a touch of psychosexual drama thrown in.

From exploring ideas of sisterhood and female independence, Almodovar went slightly off the boil with works like ‘Kika’ and ‘Tie me up! Tie me down!’. ‘Kika’ contained a rape scene that many deemed gratuitous and his crown as a ‘woman’s director’ slipped a little. He responded by changing tack and his next couple of projects focused on male protagonists. ‘Live Flesh’ is one of his finest films not least due to the performance of Javier Bardem in the lead role. Injured in the line of duty as a policeman, he plays a paraplegic struggling to reclaim his post-accident life. It’s a sensitive film that marked Almodovar out as someone who didn’t have to camp it up all the time and bizarrely is loosely based on a Ruth Rendell novel. While humour was a major part of his work til then, his films often weren’t judged on the emotional level they deserved to be.

1999’s ‘All about my Mother’ was the film that made his name in the US and brought him worldwide acclaim. Only Almodovar can show us the essence of family with drag queens and drug taking. It won him an Oscar, as did his offbeat love story ‘Talk to Her’ in which the two male protagonists bonded as the female objects of their affectations lay comatose. Almodovar’s work is so appealing for the very reasons that it’s controversial. The mirror he holds up may resemble something from a hall of mirrors in the distorted view it reflects, but we can still recognise the humanity and emotional realism of what he’s trying to show us. And that’s the rub - his films are not just about what they say, it’s about the way he demonstrates it to us.

If you’re a fan, you’ll be pleased to know that we’re in familiar territory with his new film ‘Bad Education’. The similarities between this film and his most recent work are here, but this just doesn’t impact in the same way as its two predecessors. The human element that is always at the core of his films is more than a little stifled by a complex story within story narrative structure. It’s not that it’s a lesser film; it’ s just an inversion of the way Almodovar usually presents things. It concerns a love affair that begins in the schoolyard of a Catholic school for boys that is thwarted by the paedophile principal who is love with one of the boys and expels the other to clear the way. The film dips in and out of truth and fiction and it becomes clear, when we meet Ignacio (who now calls himself ‘Angel) and Enrique, the two boys as adults, that some of the story is a film-within-a-film. Often an interesting narrative device, here it’s cumbersome. The twists get dizzying and the story we’re most interested in (of the two grown-up boys) is obscured by sub-plots, scripts and lies. However, the issue of clerical abuse - central to the labyrinthine narrative - is handled in a way that very few filmmakers could. While some might see the church as an easy target for someone who grew up in an education system dominated by Catholicism, Almodovar doesn’t go ‘The Magdelene Sisters’ route. Scenes involving the infatuated priest and his young victim are subtle but strike a balance between slightly comic and very sinister, particularly when Ignacio sings ‘Moon River’ as a birthday present for Father Manola. The ‘gift’ is organised by another priest and it’s clear that all the priests at the school are complicit in the abuse. It’s a key scene, that makes uncomfortable viewing but the way the information is presented to us, visually and without dialogue, makes us work it for ourselves. Still, the film lacks heart and perhaps spreads itself too thinly, as it feels like ‘Bad Education’ consists of lots of ideas crammed uncomfortably into the one film.

As with the female matador of ‘Talk to Her’ and the drag queens of ‘All about my Mother’, Almodovar again toys with versions of Femininity and Masculinity. He returns to the theme of homosexual love, and while it’s tenderly handled at the start (when the two boys meet), it becomes a tool of power and manipulation later in the film. Some would say he’s the ultimate (or the extreme?) post-Franco filmmaker. Even his nearest contemporary Julio Medem’s frank explorations of sexuality seem subtle alongside Almodovar. ‘Bad Education’ would be a far better film with more narrative subtlety. Almodovar is always watchable but this work suffered because of its kaleidoscopic narrative and by the end I was a little irritated by the constantly shifting perspective. Not his best work, but an interesting film that still has a much to recommend it.

Sinead Gleeson
June 2004