I took Spanish in middle school because everyone said it was the easiest language to learn. After three years of totally hating it, I switched to Latin, which was absurd. So I took a single year of French. My lack of consistency in a single language required me to take four semesters of a language in college, so I returned Spanish because I reasoned it would be the most useful.
Of course foreign language classes as they are taught in America are a waste of time. A language cannot be learned through vocabulary drills and light memorization; it requires sink-or-swim immersion and a serious commitment to go beyond assigned class material. But all my teachers dutifully went through the motions with full knowledge of the slim chance that any one pupil would retain more than a few random words.
Indeed, the only thing I clearly remember from one semester of Spanish was watching Women on a Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Subtle hints of a deeply conflicted and diseased mind pinned together the dark screwball comedy kindled a deep interest in the films of Pedro Almodóvar.
I suppose the movie was shown to our Spanish class to inspire love for the Spanish language as it is spoken by the always-enthralling characters of an Almodóvar film, but who needs to learn the language when you’ve got subtitles?
La Mala Educación’s rave reviews had me dying to see the film, as did memories of my own bad education in español. The premise: A priest at a religious school in Spain molests his star singing and writing pupil, an act that inevitably leaves scars and leads to all of the events in this movie: Blackmail, drug abuse, tons of gay sex, and literary inspiration made into cinema. Pedro Almodóvar’s movies always delve into gender psychology, but he truly outdoes himself with this one.
This movie is gorgeously filmed. Almodóvar dwells on the details worth taking in and rewards our attention by slipping reference to them later. For many, this NC-17 movie’s most memorable feature is the gay sex, and while it is occasionally graphic, I never got the sense that it was gratuitous. Indeed, if there’s any movie that gay sex belongs in, it’s the one about pedophilia and drag queens.
It was a well told story. Almodóvar movies feel like novel adaptations; the story lines are heavy with detail, and the dialogue is always carefully perfected. He never shies away from blatant visual metaphors and symbolism. The thing was, the story failed to fully capture my interest. The characters were engaging but kinda jerky, and I never found the subject of pedophilia to make for an enjoyable cinematic experience.
Still, I won’t forget this film anytime soon: Memorable, sexy, Almodóvar.
