Bad Education: B+

In the cinematic universe of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, it is pretty safe to say that a tranvestite with a secret is about as innocuous as bubble-wrapped glass -- and that the suspenseful, erotic/romantic/familial tensions created by such a "dreadful secret" are about as weighty as...well...the air said tranny would breath. Almodóvar doesn't create films, building them scene-by-scene; he envisions them -- full of irony and sass, insolence and sexuality, brash swagger and a delicious visual palette -- and they spring like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully-formed and marvelous. Or so is said. They are tricky things, his movies, and I'd be the first to admit I wasn't completely won over by the auteur by what'd I seen of his work. Yet in Bad Education, his noir-set-on-low-simmer crossed with a meta-critique of the Catholic Church, there's finally a discernible depth and passion to his work. Nothing is static...and nothing, I feel quite validated in saying and still remain spoiler-free, is what it seems.

We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?

Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.

Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.

Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.