Blog Response V: Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education"

Please read the document linked to below, as well the blog post that follows, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments.

Almodóvar on "Bad Education" and "Talk to Her"

Bad Education clearly announces its Hitchcockian roots from the very beginning: with a heavily Saul Bass-influenced title sequence over which plays a piece of music in the style of Hitchcock's most well-known soundtrack composer, Bernard Hermann:

Like Vertigo in particular, Bad Education self-consciously evokes the tropes of film noir: it centers around a story of crime and betrayal in which we are led to sympathize with the wrongdoers, and employs the figure of the femme fatale while at the same time re-interpreting this figure in bold new ways. Indeed, Almodóvar's film - as might be expected from a film made almost 60 years after the heyday of classic film noir - plays the noir formulas in far more radical ways than even Hitchcock was likely to have imagined. However, on reflection, much of what it accomplishes can be understood as only heightening the ways in which Hitchcock used the conventions of film noir to explore themes like feminine identity and obsessive sexual desire.

First and foremost, although Bad Education is, like Vertigo, haunted by a spectral version of the femme fatale, Almodóvar 'queers' this figure. That is, in Bad Education the femme fatale appears in a male guise - the character of Ignacio Rodriquez - who himself takes on a feminine guise: the drag queen identity of 'Zahara'. Like Vertigo's Madeleine, we never see Ignacio himself, but only mediated images of him as portrayed by others. Just as Ignacio achieves femininity through adopting the artifice of femininity - the external trappings (of dress, makeup, and gesture) that mark a feminine identity - several characters construct images of Ignacio through various modes of artifice. We see him through his brother Juan, who impersonates him. We see the character of Ignacio/Zahara in the story of La Visita: Ignacio as a child in Enrique's imagination; Ignacio as an adult, envisioned, in both Enrique's imagination and in the film adaptation he directs, through the image of Juan. We see Ignacio as portrayed in the story of Mr. Berenguer (formerly known as Fr. Manolo). 

Many layers of artifice collide: the character of Ignacio from La Visita is
 imagined by Enrique as Juan, who has impersonated Ignacio, impersonating the
singer/actress Sara Montiel in a travesti show

Almodóvar seems intent on letting the layers of image and artifice blend into one another, creating formidable challenges for viewers, who are often left confused on an initial viewing. For example, he has the same three actors play the characters of Ignacio, Fr. Manolo, and Fr. José in Enrique's imagination of the story of La Visita as those who play them in the film adaptation of the story. He creates not one but two distinct drag personae for Gael García Bernal to portray: the character of Zahara herself, and Zahara's drag show impersonation of Sara Montiel. Lastly, through the course of the film, three distinct actors occupy the role of Ignacio, two distinct actors portray Fr. Manolo, and three distinct actors portray Enrique.

It's in the form of an image that other people construct that Ignacio acts as the femme fatale, using sexual power to exploit and destroy. Juan impersonates Ignacio in order to further his acting career by exploiting Enrique's childhood love for Ignacio. He impersonates Ignacio again in Enrique's film - this time, as an actor. In the film of La Visita, in Enrique's imagination as he reads La Visita, and in Mr. Berenguer's story, Ignacio uses his scandalous sexuality to blackmail Fr. Manolo. And again in Berenguer's story, Juan channels the intense sexual desire that Mr. Berenguer once felt for Ignacio on himself, and manipulates Berenguer into murdering Ignacio.

Ignacio's status as something that never appears, except as a trace - an image that echoes in memories, imaginations, texts, and actions - has two important parallels in the film. First, it parallels the trauma of childhood sexual abuse itself. Despite including graphic portrayals of sex - including a childhood sexual encounter between Ignacio and Enrique - Almodóvar conspicuously cuts away whenever Fr. Manolo is about to abuse young Ignacio. However, despite being unseen, this childhood trauma leaves behind traces for decades afterwards, poisoning the life of Ignacio - who becomes a decrepit junkie - and thus the lives of Juan, Enrique, and eventually Fr. Manolo/Mr. Berenguer himself. 

The pedophile Fr. Manolo looks longingly at Ignacio

The second parallel lies in the phenomenon of drag itself. As many thinkers have noticed, in the adoption of drag versions of femininity, we find a kind of heightened femininity. That is, in an attempt to mute their masculine characteristics, many drag queens and other male-to-female transgendered persons construct an appearance that is ultra-feminine - i.e., one that is uncannily more feminine than the femininity that most biological females project: immaculate makeup, meticulously glamorous hair, ostentatiously feminine dress, movements that are carefully orchestrated to evoke sultry, erotic femininity, etc. In doing so, drag calls our attention to the many forms of artifice that are involved in the projection of a gender identity.

The drag identity most frequently referenced in Bad Education is that of the renowned Spanish singer and actress Sara Montiel:

The first invocation of Sara Montiel occurs at the beginning of Enrique's reading of La Visita. Here, we see the character of Ignacio, inhabiting the stage persona of Zahara, doing a drag version of a famous scene from a Sara Montiel film. The camera is zoomed in on Zahara's backside, and as she turns around, we see that the dress she is wearing is so explicitly feminine as to be absurd: on the crotch of the dress is a thick triangle of material simulating pubic hair; and higher up, we see that breasts and nipples have been painted on its glittery pink surface. Zahara then lip syncs to "Quizás, quizás, quizás" ("Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps"), perfectly imitating every nuance of gesture and expression from Sara Montiel's original performance:

Sara Montiel's original performance

Zahara's immaculate imitation

So-called travesti or drag queen performers were, in Spain of the 1970s, a staple of music hall shows - shows that were widely attended by straight and gay audiences alike, despite the intense prohibition of homosexuality and anything associated with it under Franco's regime. Further, Sara Montiel had, by that time, become a queer icon. This was in large part due to the fact that Montiel occupied an unusual position in Spanish culture. She at one and the same time projected both intense sexuality, and also virginal Catholic purity. Like Marilyn Monroe in the U.S., she was both a sex symbol and 'the girl next door'. In this way, she had the ability to both transgress conventional sexual norms and be accepted by mainstream society - an ability that homosexuals and the transgendered admired and aspired to. 

Later in Bad Education, we see Montiel again - this time, as the heroine of the movie that young Ignacio and Enrique watch together: Esa Mujer (That Woman, Mario Camus, 1969). In this film, the two sides of Montiel's public persona come together: as Sister Soledad, she is both the virginal Catholic nun, and the beautiful worldly woman into whom that nun eventually transforms. In a scene that foreshadows Ignacio's return to Fr. Manolo, we see Soledad return to the nunnery from which she came, so transformed as to be unrecognizable by the Mother Superior:

The last major appearance of the figure of Montiel occurs when Juan goes to see a drag show in order to prepare for the role of Zahara in Enrique's film adaptation of La Visita. As he watches, we see the real-life drag performer Sandra lip sync to the song "Maniquí" ("Mannequin"):

In the choice of song, Almodóvar carefully highlights the theme of gender artifice. First of all, in the song, we hear the voice of a mannequin come to life, boasting that, despite being seen as cold and artificial, she has the power to seduce the men of the world. Second, the Sara Montiel version of the song to which Sandra lip syncs is from a scene in the film Mi último tango. In this scene, a chorus line show goes awry when the singer's voice fails. Montiel, who plays a maid who has just arrived in Buenos Aires, saves the production by singing the singer's part for her from the wings as the singer lip syncs. In this way, she captures the hearts of everyone around her, and goes on to become a major star:

Sara Montiel steals the show

Through the use of various performances of the persona of Sara Montiel, Almodóvar deepens the theme of identity - and specifically, feminine identity - already implicit in the character of Ignacio. And, he forges deep parallels between his film and Vertigo, in which we already find a multiplicity of feminine figures that haunt, echo, and imitate one another.