Identity
GAY FILMS & MOVIES: BAD EDUCATION Starting this issue, Neville Tirimba will be reviewing gay and lesbian movies and films, albeit, as seen by a Kenyan gay audience. How ‘Western’ movies portray gay themes is critical in understanding identities and ideologies as well as politics. In addition, Neville will be rating the movies and showing you which films are worth watching. (Bad Education front poster) Oscar winning Spanish Director Pedro Almodóvar needs no introduction with his several critically acclaimed films, even though in his own words he prefers to remain an amateur. In his inimitable style, Almodóvar has written and directed yet another riveting gay interest film, La Mala Educacion (Bad Education), a fascinating psychological thriller full of secrets, forbidden desires, greed and deception. Bad Education ushers the viewer into a surreal world with its mesmerizing opening credits. The vivid red and black montage tears away in strips layer after layer, showing sexually explicit toilet graffiti, a crucifix, a drag queen in lingerie, Jesus, a priest and a drug filled syringe. It is an amoral world. The rapid tempo of the montage music is ominous, signifying a march into the brink of some calamity. The red color portends murder. The director and the writer of Bad Education is the same person and this lends a greater wholeness to the film, unlike many stillborn Hollywood films which result from their directors’ inability to exert full control over their projects, thereby failing to pursue their artistic visions to completion.
‘The characters of Bad Education, like in any of Almodóvar’s films recognize their homosexuality but don’t flaunt it nor do they hide it’
The characters of Bad Education, like in any of Almodóvar’s films recognize their homosexuality but don’t flaunt it nor do they hide it. Almodóvar, an openly gay man, is comfortable enough to have openly gay men and drag queens as characters in his films. His characters are not apologetic or sexually ambivalent as in André Téchiné’s Les roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The first scene begins in the studio of a young gay film director of repute, Enrique Goded, who is undergoing a creative crisis. It is at this moment that his old childhood love interest, Ignacio (played by Gael García Benal) who is a struggling actor, visits him looking for work. But Enrique fails to recognize him since it has been many years since he last saw him. Ignacio on the other hand insists that he be called by his acting name, Angel, and hands Enrique a story he wants made into a film.
We are then thrown into a flashback; the years of innocence where Ignacio and Enrique are young students at a Catholic school awakening to romantic feelings between them. But this awakening in them stirs jealous feelings in Father Manolo who is deeply obsessed with the young Enrique. The priest succeeds in separating them. Several years later, Ignacio dressed in drag visits the priest with a proposition. This is the turning point in the film after which the lives of the characters are forever changed. The plot in Bad Education is not as linear as it appears for we soon learn that Ignacio is hiding something about who he is. Although serious in tone, the film has moments of comic relief thanks to a few oddball characters. When Ignacio storms into Father Manolo’s Catholic Church he has his cocaine snorting sidekick in tow, who quickly steals the cups meant for Holy Communion. Ignacio’s partner in crime is none other than the star of Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her), in which he played a male nurse who has sex with a comatose woman making her awaken from her vegetative state. That’s the ever controversial Almodóvar for you. Fortunately, Almodóvar doesn’t go overboard like the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a key artistic influence on Almodóvar. Fassbinder’s gay movie, Querelle, which has become a cult movie, is contrived and too abstruse in a way that alienates most general audiences. Indeed, the appeal of Bad Education, and perhaps that of any of Almodóvar’s films, goes beyond any preconceived gay or straight boundaries. Bad Education tackles some mores head on, but it is not a mere cause célèbre, it is authentic and has substance. Almodóvar, the perpetual amateur, has claimed that Bad Education was a story that nagged him for years before he sat down to write and direct it. The many years of cogitation certainly paid off.—NEVILLE TIRIMBA RATING: 5/5