Bad Education movie storyline. Madrid, 1980: Enrique Goded, a young director of twenty-seven who, despite his youth, has already directed three successful films, is looking through the news in the tabloids for a story for his fourth film. (One item in particular attracts his attention and he cuts it out: “In a zoo in Taiwan, a woman threw herself into a pool full of crocodiles at a time when there was the greatest number of visitors. While the crocodiles were devouring her, the woman hugged one of them without making a sound.”)
The doorbell rings. The visitor is an attractive young man with a beard who says he is his old school friend, Ignacio Rodríguez. Enrique remembers his school friend, but he doesn’t recognize any of his features in the young visitor. But it’s also true that they haven’t seen for sixteen years.
Enrique doesn’t know it yet, but the search for the story for his next film is in front of him, smiling and holding out his hand. In their school days, Ignacio had a literary vocation, but he gradually gave it up for that of acting. In any case, he has brought a short story called “The Visit.” He gives it to Enrique in case it might interest him.
The story was inspired by their childhood in the school, their problems with the priests, in particular with the Principal, the repression, the soccer games, the hypocrisy, the distortion of the spirit, the harassment, the masses sung in Latin by Ignacio who was the soloist in the choir, etc.
It also tells, in parallel, of an essential discovery for the two kids – the cinema: Sara Montiel, “Hercules,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Moon River,” “Johnny Guitar,” etc.
The imagination of Ignacio-author has the three characters – himself, Enrique, and the Principal – meet (in the short story) years later, when they are adults. Enrique, although still young, has become a frustrated family man in the provinces, Father Manolo has left the congregation, and Ignacio has become Zahara.
Zahara is a drug addict transvestite who impersonates Sara Montiel (a sort of Spanish Mae West Gay icon of the ‘60s and ‘70s) and is a member of a fifth-rate variety company. The story is told from Zahara’s point of view on the night she performs in a Casino in the same city where Enrique and he went to school.
Bad Education (Spanish: La Mala Educación) is a 2004 Spanish drama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Starring Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Giménez Cacho and Lluís Homar, the film focuses on two reunited childhood friends and lovers caught up in a stylised murder mystery. Along with metafiction, sexual abuse by Catholic priests, transsexuality and drug use are also important themes and devices in the plot, which led the MPAA to give the film an NC-17 rating.
The film was released on 19 March 2004 in Spain and 10 September 2004 in Mexico. It was also screened at many international film festivals such as Cannes, New York, Moscow and Toronto before its US release on November 19, 2004. The film received critical acclaim, and was seen as a return to Almodovar’s dark stage, placing it alongside films such as Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987).
Director’s Comments
I had to make “Bad Education.” I had to get it out of my system before it became an obsession. I had worked repeatedly on the script for over ten years and I could have gone on like that for another decade. Because of the amount of possible combinations, the story of “Bad Education” was only finished once the film had been shot, edited and mixed.
“Bad Education” is a very intimate film, but not exactly autobiographical. I mean that I’m not recounting my life at school or all that I lived and learned during the first years of the “movida,” although those are the two periods in which the story is set (1964 and 1980, with an interval in 1977). Of course my memories were important when it came to writing the script. After all, I lived in the settings and in the periods in which it takes place.
“Bad Education” is not a settling of scores with the priests who “bad-educated” me or with the clergy in general. If I had needed to take revenge I wouldn’t have waited forty years to do so. The church doesn’t interest me, not even as an adversary. Nor is the film a reflection on the “movida” in Madrid at the start of the ‘80s, even though a large part of it is set in the Madrid of that time. What interests me about that historic moment is the explosion of freedom that Spain was experiencing, as opposed to the obscurantism and repression of the ‘60s. The early ‘80s are, therefore, the ideal setting for the protagonists, now adults, to be masters of their destinies, their bodies and their desires.
The film is not a comedy, although there is humor (Javier Cámara’s character), nor is it a children’s musical although there are children singing. It is a “film noir”, or at least that is how I like to think of it.
Bad Education (2004)
La Mala Educación
Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Fele Martinez, Leonor Watling, Francisco Boira, Petra Martínez, Juan Fernández, Nacho Pérez, Alberto Ferreiro, Raúl García Forneiro
Screenplay by: Pedro Almodóvar
Cinematography by: José Luis Alcaine
Film Editing by: José Salcedo
Costume Design by: Paco Delgado
Set Decoration by: Pilar Revuelta
Art Direction by: Antxón Gómez
Music by: Alberto Iglesias
MPAA Rating: NC-17 (for a scene of explicit sexual content)
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: November 19, 2004
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