Bad Education

A successful movie director (Fele Martínez) reunites with a long-lost friend, his first adolescent love (Gael García Bernal), who wants to sell him a story about their days in the same boys school, when they were separated by a jealous priest. Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar presents another of his brightly colored melodramas with heaping doses of sex and violins. He never seems to make a strong point (which isn’t the same as being pointless) but wanders around in the present, the past, the story and the film the director makes of it, until they all seem to overlap and we’re not sure where we are. It may sound annoying, but it’s really not. In fact, it’s fascinating in spots, even though the various parts don’t really seem to add up to a clear whole. Performances are fine; Bernal is especially good.