This is a part of my Pedro Almodovar Marathon.
Childhood is an important formative time in a person’s life. When that time is spent in a spiritual laden schooling system where you’re sexually abused by the principal of the institution and at the same time refused the ability to have a relationship with your one true love due to this same principal, it’s understandable that you’d be a bit messed up about it.
This however, is the backstory. Bad Education is actually the story of how Angel (Gael Garcia Bernal) meets up with a former friend, now director, proposing to make his screenplay into a film. His screenplay, entitled The Visit, is about this childhood of abuse and about how in his adult life he ended up confronting his abuser. With little to lose Angel claims he’ll do anything to play the leading role in the film of Zahara, the transvestite singer.
The film structurally broke itself in half; just as it does out main character of Ignacio (Nacho Perez). It’s split between the story of the Ignacio as a child being abused and Angel making this movie/Ignacio’s adulthood taking his revenge. This allows for the film to be taken in two separate levels, and at the same time for it to be segmented completely. While one half of the story definitely informs the other it’s also easy to see that these parts can make their own whole, which is how I decided to interpret the film. I saw the story of Angel separate for the story of Ignacio; the story of an actor trying to get this great part and become a sensation is different from the tragic story of a child unable to love.
When the film ended I couldn’t help uttering a word I find myself using to describe certain films more and more; Pulp. While the first time I heard this word used in relation to storytelling was in Pulp Fiction — which opens with a definition — I honestly never quite considered it as a genre, as opposed to just one instance of a person bending a story to be this distinctly peculiar thing. Years later I can see it’s influence (and where it takes it’s own from) and somehow I want to say that this film, more than autobiography or anything else, felt pulp to me. This could possibly be me focusing more closely on the tale of Zahara and Manuel Berenguer (Lluis Homar) than anything else when all was said and done. This may be because, like even the characters in the film, I don’t want to think too much about the childhood in this film.