Yay! An enjoyable movie-going experience! We did one of our “get the hell out of West Virginia to someplace urban” and took the opportunity to see Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education. (If it ever runs in a theatre in the Mountain State, I will be shocked.)
First of all, the audience was startlingly well behaved. Better still, they offered some fascinating eavesdropping opportunities. There was the young gay couple seated in front of us still in the early phases of dating. (Between the movie and dinner, we had lots of chances to “rate the date.” Magic Eight-Ball says, “Don’t get your hopes up.”) Behind us, there were the gay man and his lesbian friend, talking trash about addictive prescription drugs and the people who love them.
Then, the movie started, and everyone shut up. Shocking. Entirely welcome, but shocking.
The movie itself was really engrossing. The cast was uniformly good, particularly Gael Garcia Bernal, who played a handful of mercurical, varied characters extremely well. And I loved the way Almodovar appropriated bits of Alfred Hitchcock to tell his story of characters still reeling from their memories of parochial school.
Instead of borrowing all of the gimmicky visual stuff that most directors think made Hitchcock Hitchcock, Almodovar stuck with theme and feel and genuine psychological surprise. So while the film evoked memories of Vertigo and Marnie and Psycho, it evoked the way those movies make an audience feel, not the way those looked or their mechanics.
It’s not without its troubling elements; my partner had an observation about the nature of the sex portrayed in the film. But those troubling elements feel intentional, part of the whole. And it’s always exciting to see a movie or read a book or comic that has an internal consistency and a real artistic vision. We had the same reaction to Almodovar’s Talk To Her.
So, clearly I’ve got to go over to Netflix and add some more Almodovar to the queue. Any recommendations?