
In addition, García Bernal is one of the players featured in the gay sex scenes that led to Bad Education being slapped with the Motion Picture Association of America’s NC-17 rating. To the contrary notwithstanding her ornate looks and manner, Zahara is to be taken dead seriously. For all purposes an actual woman – and an enticing one at that – Zahara never comes across as a humorous caricature à la Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot or Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. Whether as Ignacio/Ángel or as the main character in “The Visit,” the blonde transvestite Zahara, he’s a compelling presence. In Almodóvar’s neo-noir, García Bernal proved himself not only one of the most versatile actors of the young century but also, at least based on what’s seen on screen, one of the most fearless.
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The same year Bad Education came out, he starred as a young, idealized Che Guevara in one of the biggest box office hits of his career, Walter Salles’ awards-season-friendly road movie The Motorcycle Diaries. García Bernal became an international name in the early 2000s, following roles in a trio of prestigious, Oscar-nominated Mexican dramas: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, and Carlos Carrera’s The Crime of Father Amaro (as a perverse Catholic priest). Yet one can’t deny that Gael García Bernal landed the most difficult and most critical character. Exceptional Gael García BernalĪs mentioned further up, the Bad Education cast is uniformly fine. But where’s it emanating from? A purported enemy or the object of desire herself?īad Education with Gael García Bernal as Zoraya. If so, is he the same Ignacio that Enrique had once known and fallen in love with? And how true-to-life is his short story?īack in the 1940s, the characters played by Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai, and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man would undoubtedly have been able to relate to Enrique’s plight. That final question mark is Bad Education’s key film noir element: Is Ignacio/Ángel who he says he is? But before all else he must deal with the fact that his first and greatest love is now back in his life. Consumed by jealousy, the priest is resolute in destroying the relationship between the two boys.Įventually, Enrique decides to make a movie out of Ignacio’s short story.


Leave Her to Heaven: Gene Tierney Shines in Color ‘Film Noir’ + Oldest Surviving Korean FilmĪnother revelation is that one of the school’s priests, the austere but personable Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), had been madly in love with Ignacio, who both looked and sang like an angel.
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Mixing reality and fiction, past and present, a series of “flashbacks” reveal that Enrique and Ignacio had been boyfriends (Alberto Ferreiro as Enrique Nacho Pérez as Ignacio) while attending Catholic boarding school in the mid-1960s. Set in 1980, right around the time Almodóvar himself began writing and directing feature films, Bad Education is centered on Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), a young moviemaker in dire need of inspiration for his next project.Ĭoincidentally, that’s when Enrique becomes reacquainted with a long-lost schoolfriend, the attractive, mysterious Ignacio – now known as Ángel (Gael García Bernal) – who presents him with a semiautobiographical short story, “The Visit,” hoping it will become the basis for a screenplay. And though far superior to that year’s five Best Picture Academy Award nominees, it failed to receive a single Oscar nod. In fact, Bad Education is such quality – and provocative – cinema that it was all but completely bypassed during the 2004–05 awards season in the United States, managing to top only the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Foreign Language Film category. In the 2004 psychological/mystery comedy-drama Bad Education / La mala educación, screenwriter-director Pedro Almodóvar subverts the conventions of the classical film noir genre while rendering one of his most accomplished, most complex, and most daring efforts.Īiding and abetting Almodóvar in the creation of this inflammatory work are the film’s two male leads, Mexican import Gael García Bernal (sporting a Castilian Spanish accent) and Fele Martínez its capable supporting cast, particularly Spanish-born Mexican star Daniel Giménez Cacho and its behind-the-scenes talent, among them cinematographer José Luis Alcaine and composer Alberto Iglesias.
