Autor: Travis | Publicado: 2012-01-28T01:47:00-02:00

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I had to make  "Bad Education". I had to get it out of my system before it became an obsession.  I had worked repeatedly on the script for over ten years and I could have gone  on like that for another decade. Because of the amount of possible combinations,  the story of "Bad Education" was only finished once the film had been shot,  edited and mixed. It is a very intimate film, but not exactly autobiographical.  Of course my memories were important when it came to writting the scrip, after  all, I lived in the settings and in the periods in which it takes places; It is  not a settling of scores with the priests who "bad-educated" me or with the  clergy in general. If I had needed to take revenge I wouldn't have waited forty  years to do so. The church doesn't interest me, not even as an adversary. It is  a "film noir", or at least that is how I like to think of it.

Film Noir  (like almost all the noble genres) adapts easily to being mixed with other  genres, provided the narrative has that breath of fatality without which black  would be grey. The noir genre mixes well with melodrama in its toughest form  ("Leave Her to Heaven", by John M. Stahl, "Mildred Pierce", Michael Curtiz),  with the most desperate romanticism ("Laura", by Preminger, La Sirène du  Mississipi", by Truffaut, "Out of the Past", by Jacques Tourneur), social  criticism (Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Vásquez Montalbán)  or terror-without-monsters, that is, the kind that comes straight from the human  heart ("Human Desire", in its two versions, Fritz Lang, whenever he works in  this genre, "Fallen Angel" and "Angel Face", both by Preminger) or the  melancholy of the violent, if a genre can be assigned to this characteristic (  Nicholas Ray: "In a Lonely Place, "On Dangerous Ground"). In film noir there may  not be policemen or guns or even physical violence, but there must be lies and  fatality, qualities that are normally embodied by a woman: the 'femme fatale".  The "femme fatale" (she isn't indispensable in the genre, but she is one of its  great icons) is a woman aware of her power of seduction, hypo tense, so she  won't be easily upset, who has lost her scruples and has no interest in  recovering them. For her, sex is not a source of pleasure, but one of pain for  everyone else. In "Bad Education", the "femme fatale" is an "enfant terrible",  the character played by Gael García Bernal, who strictly follows the examples of  Barbara Stanwich, Jane Greer, Jean Simmons ("Angel Face"), Joan Bennet ("Scarlet  Street"), Ann Dvorak, Mary Windsor, Lizabeth Scott, Veronica Lake and so many  other curses in the shape of a woman.

I like to think that cinemas are a  good refuge for murderers and for the lonely. I also like to consider the screen  as a mirror of the future. Juan and Mr. Berenguer (Gael García Bernal and Lluis  Homar) go into a cinema to kill time, after having killed someone. The evening  is growing black for three reasons: the sky threatens a storm and the cinema  where two characters end up is showing two gems of French film noir, "La Bête  Humaine" (Renoir) and "Trérèse Raquin" (Marcel Carné), both based on novels by  Zola. The two films involve situations similar to that of the two men who are  watching them as they wait for the Mediterranean night to fall. As they leave  the cinema, Mr. Berenguer, devastated, complains: "It's as if all the films were  talking about us." (The big screen as a mirror of the spectators).  The narrative reflects itself and revolves  around various visits. Even the scene the two boys see in the cinema is a visit,  to a convent (Sara Montiel, afetr living through an indescribable destiny in  "Esa Mujer" returns to the convent where she took the habits). Doubleness,  duplicity, and mirrors that multiply deform what they see. Enrique Goded decides  to film the short story written by his friend Ignacio, which triples the  versions we are seeing of the same story: the "real" story, the one told by  Ignacio in his short story, inspired by and fantasized from the real story, and  the one Enrique adapts from the short story and visualizes as a  film.

"Bad Education" is the story of a triple triangle (the two pupils  and the school principal), multiple stories that, like russian dolls, are hidden  inside each other and are really only one.

(Pedro Almodóvar comments La  Mala Educación, 2004)