2004 ‘La mala educación’ Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.
Gael García Bernal Fele Martínez Daniel Giménez Cacho Lluís Homar Francisco Maestre Francisco Boira Nacho Pérez Raúl García Forneiro Javier Cámara Alberto Ferreiro Leonor Watling Petra Martínez Roberto Hoyas Agustín Almodóvar Pedro Almodóvar Sara Montiel Pau Poch Juan Fernández Sandra Luis Martín Gil
Bad education, 毁灭性教育, 坏教欲, La Mala Educación, Halb kasvatus, Má Educação, 나쁜 교육, 不良教育, Bad Education - Schlechte Erziehung, (15) La Mala Educación
During the period of Francoist Spain, in which the country was totalitarian, and the regime favoured a very conservative Roman Catholicism approach, a particular process which came into place between 1936 and beyond - and until 1975, the time of Franco's death, Spain (in general) considered lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders transgressive, wrong and against moral & ethical codes. It was also during this time that Pedro Almodóvar, the director of Bad Education lived as an adolescent.
He himself was sent to live at a religious boarding school during this time; and of course, as the director so often does, he fuses reality and fiction allowing his own confessions (like one would confess of course at church) to filter through during…
Highkey one of the best Almodovar's. I still have a b*ner from the scene with Gael Garcia Bernal in the pool.
Almodovar is a provocateur, and here he embraces controversy with a confidence and style required to actually provoke and not just annoy. Layers under layers, stories within stories. A disturbing psychosexual mystery and an intricate triangular love story. The use of fiction and art to endure the unendurable; telling your story as catharsis, revealing your traumas as a means of dealing with them. I take back what I said about Volver being Almodovar's darkest; this is WAY darker.
i will never meet anyone half as beautiful as gael garcia bernal's ass and that is tragic
tw: rape
Almodovar's eye for color (always very clean colors, bold, bright, never smudged, never ragged, never the scummy colors of my world) and skill at crafting a visual story, at finding angles that completely alter what we're seeing from mundane to larger than life, I can't deny it. But I can't say I've yet seen a film of his that didn't involve rape for some reason, and not a single depiction of it has ever been anything but problematic. In this film, a trans woman casually sexually molests her unconscious ex-boyfriend, whom she's robbing. You're gonna want to argue that he had consented before he passed out, but that's just not how consent works. You might argue that she's…
I'm not going to tell any detail about the story of this film because if I do, it will lose all the charm. I'm just going to say that La Mala Educación tells a story full of secrets, you can feel the mystery in the air and you really don't know for sure what is going to come next. That is the reason why you'll be interested since the very beginning of the story.
The scrip is a little complex, and throughout the film you'll try to figure out what is really going on until everything is revealed and the last twist of the story is very good!
Gael García Bernal gives a great performance! His versatility is something amazing.
La Mala Educación is a tragic story told in a very original way, a fantastic work from Pedro Almodóvar.
I expected this to be a lot more disturbing and shocking than it was, which is why I didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong, Almodovar’s showcase of the manipulation and desperation through masculine sexuality is a compelling and raw force that strengthens the plot and characterization. He is able to build creativity and color into an exploration of inner emotion in intriguing ways, but I never really cared. Maybe one day I’ll revisit, or maybe this’ll be the film of his that I just don’t get.
"I'm a hedonist."
"What's that?"
"People who like having fun. I read it in an encyclopedia."
One of my favorite things about sitting down with an Almodóvar film is that his works always seem like those of someone who has something meaningful to say. Better yet, he always manages to do so with eloquence, biting insights, and exceptional dramatic structuring. La Mala Educación is a prime example of these elements. Regarded as one of his darkest films, it tells a thorny tale that expertly genre-shifts, entrancing you as it pulls you deeper and deeper into its tragicomic orbit. More than anything else, it's considerably impressive how well Almodóvar pulls off a yarn with a good deal of grim subject matter…
