Bad Education

Up front, so no one gets the wrong idea: this is an exceptionally good movie. But I feel about it just what I thought I’d feel about his four or five most recent films (the transcendent emotional experience that was All About My Mother surprised me): they’re perfect; I admire them; I cannot love them. Pedro spent ten years putting this film together, and somehow it shows in the final product. It’s a complicated, carefully constructed, perfectly realized narrative. It is impressive how naturally he weaves threads of reality, fiction and memory, and achieves as many as five distinct, shifting characters in one person. But it’s coldly impressive, because somehow you see the gears turning. It feels practiced. It’s too precise. I do prefer his earlier films: wilder, less glossy, with spiralling narratives that nearly lose all sense until he finally reigns his threads in with a brilliant conclusion. Bad Education is perfect — and that may be its flaw.