Intrigued-jeez, Louise, who wouldn’t be?-Enrique decides to make this movie, but he doesn’t want to cast Ignacio as Zahara, saying his friend is too masculine-looking for the role.
Ignacio’s story then jumps forward, to a time when he’s transformed himself into Zahara, a drug-addict transvestite who confronts Manolo. Skeptical, Enrique reads Ignacio’s story, which is about a period in Enrique’s life when, in Catholic school, he and Ignacio were 10-year-old boys in love with each other and how Ignacio was molested by a priest, Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho). Into his production office strides a handsome fellow who says he’s Enrique’s old school chum, Ignacio, he’s now an actor, and he’s written a semiautobiographical tale that would make a good starring vehicle for himself.
It begins in 1980 Madrid, as Enrique (Fele Martínez), a successful young director, searches for a subject for his next film. The Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker’s new movie, Bad Education, takes the notion of falling in love with the “wrong” person to a new, delirious extreme. He remembers, in film after film, what many of us, once hurt, would like to forget: those times when you’ve loved someone so intensely it seems as though your chest will burst when the mere sight of the person you’re obsessed with makes you shake inside when those feelings erupt in ways that doom or explode whatever relationship you may be trying to nurture.
Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classicsĭirector Pedro Almodóvar excels at finding ways of putting desire, agonizing unrequited love, and purely impure horniness on a movie screen. Director Pedro Almodóvar with actor Gabriel García Bernal.