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Pedro Almodovar's autobiographical new film, Bad Education, is an unusually somber and complex work. Pingree teases out the historical and political implications of Almodovar's intricate melodrama and underlines affinities between the irreverent director's maturation and Spain's progress from dictatorship to vibrant democracy.

When spectators lined up in Madrid for the Spanish premiere of Pedro Almodóvar's new film, Bad Education, they were met by an angry crowd that pelted them with tomatoes and eggs. The outrage stemmed not from the movie's potentially volatile subject-the sexual abuse of young boys by the clergy to whom they were entrusted-but from statements that Almodóvar himself had made a few days earlier. In response to the March llth bombings and to the ruling Popular Party's initial attempts to cast blame for those attacks on the Basque terrorist group ETA, the filmmaker raised-if somewhat provocatively-legitimate questions about the fairness of the government's actions in the days before the country's elections. In the controversy that ensued, art and political life merged abruptly as Almodovar's most mature film met a Spain grappling with its own maturity as a democratic nation.

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Typical of much of the director's work, Bad Education's encounters and tensions are intensely personal, its characters and situations saturated with autobiographical references. Yet the movie's tone is uncharacteristically dark, and its mode of resolution reflects-more precisely than any of his previous films-the particular society and culture for and about which Almodóvar speaks (he recently told The New York Times [September 5, 2004], "Everything I am is a response to this place [Spain]"). While Bad Education may be his most intimately playful and privately self-conscious movie, it is also perhaps his most politically relevant.

At first glance, Bad Education shares much with Almodóvar's earlier motion pictures-complex, often hilarious dramas featuring transgressive protagonists and unpredictable outcomes. This film, too, includes flamboyant drag queens both lovable and dangerous, emotional high jinks, and characters in thrall to their passions. But by the time it has reached its conclusion, Bad Education has acquired a portentous gravity seldom evident in his previous movies.

Age is at the root of this distinctly serious tone, for-more than anything else-Bad Education is a work of, and about, maturation. It is first a painful story about growing up for its central characters: Ignacio, a sexually abused boy who becomes a transsexual and struggles with drug addiction; his younger brother Juan, an aspiring actor who attempts to succeed in the film business by selling the story of Ignacio's relationship with the priest who abused him; Enrique, Ignacio's schoolmate and first love and now the film director to whom Juan tries to sell Ignacio's story; and the priest himself, Father Manolo, who leaves the church to seek a new life and identity. It is also a reckless and exuberant coming of age tale for late 1970s and early 1980s Spain, a long-repressed society newly released from the strictures of Franco's dictatorship into the moral and cultural upheaval of the movida.1 And it is a work that itself, along with its director, has had to come of age-evolving for thirty years before Almodovar was able to realize it as a film.

Indeed, in his prologue to the recently published screenplay, the director explains that Bad Education has been with him since 1973, an "obsession" and "refuge" to which he has continually turned whenever he has found time away from his other projects. Written first to avenge his Catholic school education and the priests who administered it, Bad Education-long titled The Visits-is the only film that Almodóms to have felt no pressure to complete. "The passage of time has been good to Bad Education," he says, as "each new version that I wrote took me further away from the original idea, and my perspective became more complete, less schematic, richer and darker" (Colecció Espiral, 2004, 11-13). This process of ripening into darkness, obviously crucial to the human characters Almodótes in the movie, seems central as well to Almodó himself as an evolving filmmaker, and to Spain as a time and place-both within the film, and in the present moment.

But Bad Education's exquisitely amassed gloom is not, finally, a nihilistic or even pessimistic gesture. The acquisition of wisdom and maturity is often depicted, especially in narrative film, as a progression towards clarity and simplicity. But the laws of human growth are different in the world of this movie-something first intimated in Bad Educations exceedingly complex narrative structure. What may be most obvious upon first viewing the film, in fact, is how complicated and confusing is its plot. This confusion makes the movie's initial appeal primarily visual-because the images are beautiful and striking, yes, but also because actor Gael Garcia Bernai impersonates at least three of the movie's central characters, a visual match that offers the first solid clues about what is going on, and what might lie ahead.

The question "Who is he?" moves to the fore, preceding more conventional questions about motivation and action, and Garcia Bernal's reliable presence, in multiple characters and worlds, soon makes clear that this is a movie within a movie, a story inside a story. But this particular layered narrative structure, something Almodóured for over three decades, seems less intended to impress or confuse than to set up a particular-and, for the director, new-kind of conclusion. Certainly the film's elaborate form, which heightens, and sometimes provides, powerful moments of intrigue, helps Bad Education succeed, plotwise, as what the director has, on his website and elsewhere, called a work of film notr. But more than infusing the external action with suspense, this torturous structure underscores the existential murkiness that descends on the characters as they confront their complex and contradictory selves and attempt to realize their genuine desires. What may be most memorable about the characters' struggles to examine and accept themselves-to somehow mature-is that each remains messily, tragically unresolved.

Thus a work that is beautiful to the eye-stunningly staged, lit, and shot, as lovely to look at as either of Almodóst two movies, All About My Mother and Talk to Her-is not a beautiful story. But among all those the director has told, it is the most seasoned, and perhaps most important. Almodón speaks of his admiration for redemptive rituals-religious or not-and of his wish to find redemption for his films' characters. Likewise, the theme of redemption appears regularly in writing about his films. But Bad Education may be the first movie in which the director redeems his characters by releasing them to the agony of their own wisdom, the first movie in which he frames redemption itself as a process of maturity through suffering. For the filmmaker, then, the work's darkness seems, ironically, to represent a new horizon, one that is, if not hopeful, then full of meaningful possibility.

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And this sense of possibility extends beyond the world of the film itself. Almodóvar's friend Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charles Chaplin and granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill, and an established figure in Spanish cinema herself, told El País (March 28, 2004) that there are at least two Pedro Almodóvars-the humorous one that resembles her father, and the dark one that is similar to her grandfather. If Almodóvar's regular use of character impersonation in his past movies has been, as he has explained, a way to articulate his different selves, then his latest film may signal a significant turn towards himself as an artist. For though it features the act of impersonation as much as any of his movies, Bad Education engages with it in a different way, piercing the essential paradox of this process by revealing how acts of impersonation yield both self-knowledge and anguish.

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Continuously unraveling, Bad Education is a movie that both heightens and undermines the process of impersonation. As it unfolds, the film's concentric narratives and blurred characters shift the emphasis from "Who is he?" to "What will he become?" Despite its self-conscious, layered structure, and its complex mixture of fiction and reality, the movie is not just a story in which highly idiosyncratic characters transgress social boundaries at every level (something we have come to expect from Almodóvar), but also a world in which such characters are left to confront the inner conflicts that largely motivate their idiosyncrasies. And so Bad Education-the director's first film to focus exclusively on men and boys, on their relationships with each other and with themselves-becomes a type of confession; examining the consequences of characters moving "fictionally" among the movie's "real worlds," Almodovar signals that he has adjusted his own relationship with the characters and worlds he creates, and that he has confronted a process of impersonation by which he has in the past merely dramatized his own various and conflicting personae.

This gesture gives transformative power to the film's dark tenor, but it also helps make sense of the movie's strong autobiographical flavor. For despite Almodóvar's repeated insistence that while his work is influenced by personal events, it is not autobiographical, Bad Education features characters and experiences that appear directly rooted in his life. Almodóvar attended a parochial boarding school in Extremadura much like the one in the film where Ignacio and Enrique meet, and he has frequently admitted being aware of the kind of abuse that Father Manolo commits. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the movie's most haunting sequence-in which the priest first seduces Ignacio, then discovers Ignacio and Enrique together in a bathroom stall after curfew, leverages Ignacio to have sex with him to save Enrique from being expelled, then breaks his promise and dismisses Enrique from the school to eliminate him as a suitor-coming from someone not familiar with such experiences, for the scenes somehow generate a sympathy for all the characters involved and render the struggle of intimacy as something both tender and terrifying.

The childhood scenes are set in the late Sixties, a period that was for Franco the last act in a nearly forty-year reign, a time in which the dictator, a master impersonator himself, maintained a rigidly ordered society built on the illusion that life was simple and truth clear-cut. But Bad Educations present-day setting, when the protagonists all, in some fashion, attempt to confront themselves, is set just after the end of that dictatorship, when decades of repression gave way, in some circles at least, to the exuberant creative outburst of the movida. As it is for Enrique, the movida was the time in which Almodóvar first began to experiment as a filmmaker.

And Bad Education-deploying a dense series of adulatory references to the cinema of the director's youth (from the Cine Olympo, to the abundance of old movie posters, to the appearance, as herself, of Spanish film legend Sara Montiel)-also echoes Almodóvar's own oft-expressed love of the world of movies. An avowed agnostic, the director has nonetheless referred to the cinema as his "god," the altar upon which he worships and imaginatively embraces human complexity (Pedro Almodóvar Interviews, UP of Mississippi, 2004, xiv). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that he angrily wrote the first script version of Bad Education just prior to the movida, as Franco's regime was about to expire, and that he has completed a much different-a much more mature-film now, when Spain is itself a rapidly evolving, if messy, democracy.

Indeed, despite the obvious and frequent similarities between Bad Educations events and characters and Almodóvar's personal life, it may be most useful to think of this work not as autobiography, but as prosopography-a collective biography for the country in which it is set. For Bad Education not only embodies a new kind of awareness for Almodóvar himself, it reflects essential elements of Spain's consciousness as a country. As the director's past fictional characters have served to dramatize his different selves, so his evolution as a filmmaker-culminating, for the moment, with this latest work-has acted out a process of maturity through suffering for an audience of film spectators, and for a nation of democracy-seeking Spaniards. In this regard, Bad Education possesses a subtle political dimension not found in Almodóvar's other work, an element that binds him in unprecedented ways to his own ongoing narrative, and to his country's evolving history as well.

Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that for decades Spain's own growth into adulthood, after forty years of enforced childhood under the authoritarian rule of Franco, has been as unresolved as the characters' struggles in Bad Education. A new constitution, forged in 1979, declared Spain a secular state but undermined that status with measures that granted special privileges to the Catholic Church. A military coup in 1981 nearly brought the entire democratic experiment to a catastrophic halt. And the question of what to do with the country's two regions that long for greater autonomy-Catalonia and the Basque Country-continues to force Spaniards to think about what 'Spain' means.

Yet after decades of not talking about its past, Spain now is nearly obsessed with its memory of what has happened in the past seventy years. In part, this is a long-overdue conversation about the country's 1936 civil war-a conflict whose atrocities were conveniently suppressed not only during the forty years of dictatorship, but also in the period following Franco's death as an implicitly agreed-upon method for achieving a peaceful transition to democracy. But since the change in government this past spring, the return to difficult historical events and interpretations has expanded to include the dictatorship itself. As recently as 2003, the Popular Party deputies refused to participate in a congressional homage to the victims of the Franco regime. Now, one year later, the Socialist Party has voted to require that Socialist-governed towns change the names of all streets still bearing the mark of the old regime (Spain is full of "Avenidas del Generalisimo"). Families of political prisoners condemned by Franco's government for leftist activities are demanding the judicial rehabilitation of their loved ones. Books, magazine articles, and documentary films about memory-of exile, of concentration camps, of the everyday injustices and repressions that thrived under the dictatorship-proliferate.

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Like Ignacio, Enrique, Father Manolo, and the other characters in Bad Education, Spain has, for some time now, been asking questions about its identity: Is the country really a democracy? Does it include all of its citizens? What does 'Spain' really mean, and who gets to define it? The events of midMarch brought this discussion to a head, and when Spaniards-intuiting that their government was lying to them-had the opportunity to test the democratic process, they acted and, in effect, threw the bastards out. A deep understanding of representative political government requires more than isolated actions, however dramatic, and the repercussions of March 2004, along with the struggle to nurture a truly functional democracy, will continue to be felt long after Prime Minister Zapatero has retired. The bombings were in part possible, after all, because after decades of being physically and ideologically closed to the outside world, Spain has begun to flourish as an open, ethnically diverse, politically tolerant society.

Yet the country's recent political events, like the film, suggest a growing awareness that maturity comes through suffering. In El País and elsewhere, Almodóvar described Bad Education as his attempt to capture the drunken freedom of a newly liberated society in the post-Franco Spain of the early 1980s. But the freedoms embraced by the film's characters are hardly joyful or fulfilling, as they simply allow the protagonists to grapple with their individual tragedies in new ways. The same might be said for the strength that Spaniards displayed on March 14, when, in response to unprecedented national tragedy, and to their belief that they were being deceived, they demonstrated a new maturity of democratic process-one previously thought fragile and untestedand participated in huge numbers both to mourn the country's loss and to express a wish for political change.

Almodóvar could not, of course, have imagined this outcome while he was making Bad Education. But the elements that distinguish this film from his previous work-the somber tone, the lack of resolution, the simple message (delivered in a complicated way) that maturity comes from suffering-resonate broadly. Throughout his career (and in a "self-interview" distributed with this latest movie in Spain), Almodovar has spoken of his unwillingness to judge his films' characters, of his desire to help each of them-no matter how fallen-find that bit of redemption. In Bad Education, Almodóvar still seeks to redeem, but by leaving his characters mired within unfinished struggles for deliverance, he explores redemption of a different kind. No scores are settled or institutions attacked; while the film revolves around a priest's act of pedophilia, Father Manolo too eventually embodies the virtue of self-acceptance. In Spain today, the public is shifting its energies away from evening accounts from the past, towards understanding and transcending it. However gradual, the country does indeed seem to be ripening, maturing. Perhaps in the crystalline moment of March 11th, in that dark cloud of suffering, Spaniards saw something in themselves-and glimpsed a new hope for national redemption.