Gorgeous, Glamorous, Grappling With Their Temptations
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“Bad Education” mostly takes place during daylight hours and in softly lit interiors. The film is written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, so the sun is mellow, the interiors are painted in rich, triple-coat hues, and the people who move through them are gorgeous, and gorgeously dressed. Shades of red dominate the production design, from crimson to russet to hot, pop pink. But underneath the wet lipstick and modernist furniture, the daydream meadows and highlife swimming pools, a moodier spectrum insinuates itself – cruel shades of noir.
“Bad Education” is the darkest of Mr. Almodovar’s films. Like “Talk To Her,” it is a story about desire and the irrational, but where that much-adored film released its characters to a bright future – even the dead ones – “Bad Education” is all downward spiral. Partially autobiographical, always self-referential, it feels raw, close to the bone.
Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) is a successful Madrid-based filmmaker. One afternoon, a handsome young man cold-calls his office with a short story titled – what else? – “The Visit.” To Enrique’s shock, it is Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), his boyhood love. Ignacio, alas, has become an uninspired aspiring actor, and he makes it known that there ought to be a big part for him should the story prove filmable. Goded begins to read, and “Bad Education” begins to slide into puzzle structures.
For instance, the movie we’re now watching – the boyhood years of Enrique and Ignacio – is understood to be a flashback, prompted by the text of “The Visit.” Sometime later, by the simple magic of cinema, it will morph into the movie Goded has started to produce. Quite aside from the realization that this narrative is more deceptive than it seems, everything starts to spin when we factor in that Goded is an obvious stand-in for Mr. Almodovar. “Bad Education” achieves a kind of in-folding transparency, and its foremost pleasure is to watch how neatly these weightless Escher corridors slide into place.
There’s real mastery here, a tremendous facility with storytelling through images. In the flashbacks this cool craftsmanship is joined by fierce emotional intensity. The setting is a placid Catholic boy’s school, where Ignacio falls for Enrique in the middle of a soccer match. Mr. Almodovar takes obvious devices (slow motion, woozy music) and strips them free of cliche, as only a supremely confident artist knows how. First you smile at their charmingly innocent meet-cute, then your eyes widen to absorb the transcendent clarity of feeling and style.
The movie returns once more to this erotic stillness when Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez-Cacho) brings his boys out for a pastoral frolic. With an eye on Eakin’s “Swimming Hole,” Mr. Almodovar slows time to a laze and tosses their happy bodies into a pond. Ignacio sits to the side with Father Manolo, strumming a guitar and crooning “Moon River.” You start to smirk; this is borderline ridiculous. But the smirk doesn’t last long.
With a discrete glide of the camera and an abrupt stop to the music, Mr. Almodovar signals an act of molestation. Seconds later, Manolo pulls up his pants as Ignacio stumbles back into the frame, his forehead divided in two by a dark drip of blood. Shifting back to the present (which happens to be 1980),”Bad Education” concerns itself with the long, tragic aftermath of this abuse and the division it inflicted on the mind and body of Ignacio.
Too much synopsis would betray the surprises, of which there are many, most bad news. Suffice to say Mr. Bernal plays several roles and wears some pretty skimpy dresses. A modestly gifted actor, he’s a splendid object of desire, and Mr. Almodovar uses both his limitations and his beauty to great advantage. Mr. Martinez, in the less flashy part, holds the screen against his co-star’s glamour and his director’s scene-stealing voluptuousness of style.
With “Talk To Her,” I was troubled by the way this same voluptuousness seemed to cozy over some very disturbing (and dubious) ideas about redemption and the autonomy of women. The hypnotic beauty of its pastel harmonies, glamorous actors, and suave camera glides struck me as a dangerous kind of narcotic, something to haze the mind from grappling with the full implications of the plot.
“Bad Education” is dosed by that same wonderful drug, but carries through on the terrors of its story. In “Talk To Her,” the darkest knots of desire are untangled by Pina Bausch, guitar strumming, the miracle of childbirth. In “Bad Education,” paradox implodes. In the most audacious scene in the film, Father Manolo is overcome by Ignacio’s voice during a private recital – the siren song that will dash him on the rocks.
By the final scene of the film, once all the treacheries have been confessed, and all the bruises have throbbed to their limit, “Bad Education” seems poised to fade into the bleakest of shadows. And then the word “passion” blossoms on screen, filling it to the very edge. Goded/Almodovar survive the implosion, and learn how to make art from its aftershocks.
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The greatest track record in contemporary movies began in 1991.That was the year – a great date in the history of movies – when Wong Kar-wai’s “Days of Being Wild” opened in Hong Kong. Audiences were perplexed, critics amazed; a new wave in cinema had begun to swell. A couple of years later it crashed down on everyone, flooding the eyes of the world with impossibly cool fin-de-siecle visions and rapturous hallucinations of lost time: “Chungking Express,” “Ashes of Time,” “Fallen Angles,” Happy Together,” “In The Mood For Love,” “2046.” The juries at Cannes weren’t the only ones to swoon, and Quentin Tarantino wasn’t the only one watching them through tears of joy. For a generation of cinephiles who surfed the first New Wave on VHS, Mr. Wong can do no wrong.
Timid as the American art house is, it took the enthusiasm of a Miramax backed Tarantino to get “Chungking Express” into theaters. And now we can thank the enthusiasm of Kino Pictures and Film Forum for finally giving “Days of Being Wild” its New York theatrical premiere.
The setting is 1960s Hong Kong, called forth out of Mr. Wong’s memory as a shabby-chic dreamscape of smoky apartments, moody nightclubs, empty streets that seem to glow with pale green radiation. This is Mr. Wong’s Combray – we’ll be back here for “In The Mood For Love” and “2046” – and there’s a Proustian density to the film’s production design (by the extraordinary William Chang, one of Wong’s most inspired collaborators.)
The late Leslie Cheung stars as a Yuddy, a callous, low-rent playboy who embarks on a series of ill-fated affairs. Never more exquisite, Maggie Cheung (Lai-Chun) plays his first love interest, a reticent cafe worker soon dumped for the ebullient showgirl Mimi (Carina Lau).What there is of a plot has Yuddy trek off to the Philippines to find his birth mother, then tangle in some gangster shenanigans. But in this, his second film, Mr. Wong has stopped writing prose to give us poetry.
“Days of Being Wild” is all mood, sensation, nonverbal effect. It’s about the auditory texture of footfall blending with raindrops and the incessant metronome of ticking clocks; the weave of a curtain against patterned wallpaper; cigarette smoke curling in lamp glow. It’s about cinematographer Christopher Doyle turning color and light into movie stars, and a great lyrical filmmaker venturing deep into their imaginative space. “Days of Being Wild” sets the tone for all the great Wong films to come, their yearning and whimsy, their butterfly fragility. It’s one of the most ravishing pieces of celluloid to unspool through a projector this year.
“Days of Being Wild” until November 25 (Film Forum, 209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick, 212-727-8112).