Bad Education
Chazen Museum of Art 750 University Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53706
press release: BAD EDUCATION (LA MALA EDUCACIÓN)
Spain | 2006 | 35mm | 121 min. | Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Pedro Almodóvar; Cast: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara
Bernal stars in this ingenious labyrinth of nested stories, which takes Almodóvar’s longstanding fascination with shifting identities to its culmination. In 1980 Madrid, a prominent film director is visited by a former lover pitching a short story taken from their youthful fling at a Catholic boarding school. As the story is relayed, Almodóvar masterfully whisks us between multiple planes of reality, fiction, and stories-within-stories. When the author insists on playing the lead in the production, yet another level of secrets and betrayals comes spilling forth. “A giddy cinematic pastiche of film noir and high camp, Bad Education is about the shape-shifting artifice of dreams and the experience of going to the movies. An embarrassment of riches” (Slant).
Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
For our Fall Sunday afternoon series at the Chazen Museum of Art, we will screen the beautiful and influential work of contemporary Spanish cinema’s best-known filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. A veritable industry onto himself, Almodóvar, as a writer, producer and director, has carved out a substantial slice of the international moviegoing audience for his classically told tales of offbeat lives and offbeat love. Almodóvar is an artist who does not hide his cinematic influences but every aspect of his work – from production design to storytelling techniques - always feels decidedly personal.
All Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public.