Bad Education

Almodóvar opened the Cannes Film Festival with Bad Education in 2004, the first Spanish film to do so, and made the darkest thing in his filmography. He had been writing versions of it since the 1970s; it draws on his own education at a Salesian school in Cáceres, and he has been careful to say how much is invented.

Enrique Goded is a director in Madrid in 1980 looking for a subject. A man arrives claiming to be Ignacio, his first love from their boarding school, now an actor using the name Ángel, and gives him a manuscript. The film then moves between the present, the story as written, and the story as it may have actually happened, with Gael García Bernal playing several versions of the same person — including a transvestite performer confronting the priest who abused them both. Alberto Iglesias wrote a Herrmann-inflected score and José Luis Alcaine shot it in the reds and blacks of forties noir.

It is Almodóvar's most rigorously structured film, a nest of narrations in which every version has an interested party telling it, and it treats the abuse at its centre without either sentiment or exploitation. Reviewers in Spain were divided over how directly it addressed the Church; internationally it was widely regarded as one of his three or four best. Bernal's performance is the most complete of his career.