Learning Curve
by Howard Schumann

Bad Education, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's comedy/ film noir, delights in being outrageous, thumbing its nose at mainstream conventions with its explicit depictions of gay sexuality and egotistical power plays. Featuring stories within stories, the film is set in 1980 with flashbacks to 1964 and 1977 and, like many of the director's previous films, depicts characters undergoing a crisis of identity.

Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal), is an out-of-work actor who visits Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), a successful film director, and recalls their relationship when they both attended Catholic school as young children. Although they haven't seen each other in sixteen years, their reaction is immediate. When Ignacio, who asks to be called Ángel, hands Enrique a story called "The Visit" based on his experience of their school days, Enrique believes he may have found the script for his next film.

The story describes the bond between Ignacio and Enrique --their shared experience of the unwanted overtures of the Catholic priest Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). In a fantasy sequence, flashbacks return us to the Catholic school and we see Ignacio and Enrique in the first blush of sexual attraction as they hold and do other activities with their hands in a movie theater, in a scene that is as unnecessary as it is exploitative. The priest, a literature professor, is clearly attracted to young Ignacio, and when he finds the two boys together in the bathroom, he expels Enrique, presumably so he can have Ignacio to himself. The story also recounts Ignacio's later life as Zahara, a drug addicted drag queen working at a local club who picks up the adult Enrique as a trick and later attempts to blackmail Father Manolo for one million dollars.

Ignacio insists that he play the role of Zahara in the film, but Enrique tells him that he is not right for the part. When Ignacio withdraws the offer to film his story, Enrique begins to have doubts about his visitor and investigates his past, discovering that he is not who he pretends to be. Having won the coveted role of Zahara, however, Ángel becomes Enrique's friend and lover. The second half of the film becomes darker and more convoluted as Almodóvar attempts to emulate film noir conventions and the film degenerates into sordid melodrama.

The popular Mexican actor García Bernal is dressed in drag for much of the film and is displayed in many sexually alluring poses throughout its running time. I am not easily offended by explicit sexuality on the screen, whether gay or straight, yet without any conversation, a touch of romance, or other hallmarks of our humanity, it seemed distasteful. As in Talk to Her, Almodóvar attempts to poeticize irresponsible behavior and to shock us into awareness of the outer limits of the human condition. Yet the fact that the priest is not shown attempting to molest the boys (and in fact gets off rather easy) does not allow us to connect the trauma of the school years with the madness of the present day, and the resultant anti-social behavior has little impact.

In Bad Education, Almodóvar has given us a very personal film, one that he claims to be autobiographical, expect for specific details. It is stylish and playfully seductive and can be fun, yet for me it will almost certainly be considered a minor work. I found the characters neither interesting nor likeable, all acting like ten-year olds in perpetuity. The first hour of the film is engaging and Mr. Bernal is a talented actor, but at the end I was left wondering what the purpose of all of it was. While the subject is a serious one and demands serious treatment, Bad Education treats it in a manner that is flippant and unsatisfying.

In Rosenstrasse (2003), Margarethe von Trotta blends two stories to create a vibrant tapestry of love and courage. The film depicts a family drama of estrangement between a mother and her daughter, and the story of German women who staged a protest on Rosenstrasse to free their Jewish husbands from certain extermination. In addition to the dramatization of historical events, the focus of the film is on the saving of a child from the Holocaust by a German and the result of the child's experience of losing her mother. While Ms. von Trotta shows that the courage of a small number of Germans made a difference, she does not use it to excuse German society. Indeed, she shows how in the midst of torture and extermination, the wealthy artists and intellectuals of German high society went on about their lives and parties, oblivious to the suffering.

Rosenstrasse opens in New York as Jewish widow Ruth Weinstein (Jutta Lampe) decides to sit Shiva, a seven-day period of mourning that takes place following a funeral in which Jewish family members devote full attention to remembering and mourning the deceased. When her daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader), is forbidden to receive phone calls from her fiancé Luis (Fedja van Huêt), a non-Jew, Hannah questions why her mother has suddenly decided to follow an Orthodox tradition that she previously rejected. When Ruth coldly rejects her cousin, Hannah questions her and learns about a woman named Lena who took Ruth in as a child when the latter's mother was deported and murdered by the Nazis, and she vows to find Lena and discover the secret of her mother's past.

Her quest takes her to Berlin where she finds Lena (Doris Schade), now ninety years old, and interviews her on the pretext that she is a journalist researching certain aspects of the Holocaust. With unfailing memory, Lena tells her story of how, as a young 33-year old woman (Katja Riemann), she searched for her husband, Jewish pianist Fabian Israel Fischer (Martin Feifel), who disappeared and was presumed to have been imprisoned despite the protection normally given Jews in mixed marriages. Lena, in a radiant performance by Reimann, discovers that her husband and other Jews are being held prisoner in a former factory on the Rosenstrasse.

Standing together in the freezing night, German women whose husband are missing congregate outside the building, their numbers growing daily until they reach one thousand shouting "Give us back our husbands." Lena finds Ruth (Svea Lohde), a young girl whose mother is in the building. She takes care of her, protecting her from the Gestapo and raising her after her mother is killed. Lena comes from an aristocratic German family and her brother, recently returned from Stalingrad, is a Wehrmacht officer. After being refused help from her father to free Fabian she enlists the aid of her brother who tells a fellow officer, "I know what they do to the Jews. I saw it". Given his support, she is bold enough to bypass channels and go to the top where her beauty and charm prove irresistible for the Minister of Culture, Joseph Goebbels, a known womanizer. While this fictional part of the film has been criticized as degrading to the women protestors, it is a historical fact that Goebbels was very active in making the decisions affecting Rosenstrasse.

The director Margarethe von Trotta, an activist, feminist, and intellectual, is no stranger to political drama. She directed a film about Socialist Rosa Luxembourg, as well as Marianne and Julianne, a story of the relationship between two sisters, one of whom resorts to political violence to accomplish her liberal objectives. In Rosenstrasse, a film she worked on for eight years, she had to make compromises, adding the present day fictional element in order to have her film produced. That it works so well is a tribute to Ms. von Trotta's artistry and the beautiful screenplay by Pamela Katz, whose father was a refugee from Leipzig. The events at Rosenstrasse give the lie to Germans, who say, "There was nothing we could do." Now von Trotta has shown the opposite to be true, that something could be done to resist the Nazis. It is tragic that the example did not catch on.


©2005 Howard Schumann
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