Despite Pedro Almodovar's reputation for portraying forms of sexual outrageousness and deviance, most of his films are pretty straight-in All About My Mother, not one but two characters are impregnated by a transvestite, underscoring that his gender-bending is often more concerned with drag camp than sexual orientation. Talk to Her's matador, Rosario Flores, is the sexiest woman in drag since Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and her devoted lover treats her as such, which upsets gender roles in a solidly hetero way.

Bad Education is every bit as interested in drag for drag's sake but only within the context of an almost entirely gay male world, where the camp is secondary to character and story. Here, Almódovar seemingly feels comfortable enough in making a movie about gay men to stop using women as their surrogates; as a result his male characters are allowed more depth and nuance. Perhaps it's all due to Bad Education's autobiographical ingredients, and we're meant to understand the film as his personal narrative of abuse and recrimination. Or maybe it's not as personal as all that, and maybe he's hard at work now on a film that lovingly depicts more coke-snorting transvestite prostitutes in early Eighties Madrid.

Bad Education is Almodovar's film noir, and it is by far his most masculine film. His last two films (Talk to Her and All About My Mother) are melodramas-a decidedly feminine genre-and as such are populated by the well-developed female characters for which Almódovar is famous. In comparison, there is a stunning absence of women in Bad Education. Those that do appear can be counted on one hand, and their total screen time probably lasts less than five minutes: Ignacio's long-suffering mother and grandmother; the peripherally glimpsed make-up girl Monica (played by Leonor Watling, the comatose ballerina in (Talk to Her); and, courtesy of archival footage, Sara Montiel-an idol of femininity, but not woman in the flesh.
The film begins in “Madrid-1980” (according to a helpful opening intertitle) in the office of the accomplished film director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), as he sifts through newspaper clippings looking for the plot of his next film. He is interrupted by a butch, bearded man clad in plaid (played by ascending dreamboat Gael García Bernal) who introduces himself as his childhood friend Ignacio, now an aspiring actor known by the stage name Angel. Ignacio/Angel asks Enrique to read a story he has written, “The Visit,” based in part on their childhood. Enrique politely agrees (though he stubbornly refuses to use the stage name), promises to call, and sends him on his way. Enrique explains to his assistant: “He was my first love.”

That evening, when Enrique reads the story in his dark, empty home, Almódovar cuts to the action of Ignacio's tale as it unfolds in the film Enrique is about to make. The first shot of the film-within-the-film shows an old movie house plastered with layers of posters obscuring everything but the eyes of Sara Montiel, the Spanish-language film star and campy muse of the postwar period. Another cut reveals the closest thing to Sara in the flesh: a Jean-Paul Gaultier dress so memorable it deserves its own place in the credits. Beads outline the butt, breasts, and pubic triangle. When the camera finally winds its way to the top of the dress, we discover that it's Angel in the role of Zahara, Ignacio's vampy drag alter-ego. Zahara sings in a lispy Castilian accent, wagging her tongue seductively at one nightclub patron in particular, who turns out to be a childhood sweetheart named Enrique.

The action thus far has been nothing more than a prelude to a three-act drama that unfolds with stunning precision and economy, taking place in three different time periods: sometime in the early Sixties, 1977, and 1980. Most characters are played by at least two actors to account for change over time, and there's also the challenge of distinguishing the film-within-the-film from “reality”-all this in a terse 105 minutes.

The first act is set in the early Sixties, at a Catholic boarding school in Franco's Spain, where Ignacio and Enrique first meet. Their cinematic and sexual awakening happens simultaneously, in the dark theater showing a Sara Montiel film. These remembered snapshots of childhood are by far the most lyric scenes in the film: the pupils and priests play soccer in the schoolyard in slow motion to choral harmonies. Boys swim naked in a bucolic lake, as young Ignacio sings “Moon River” to the accompaniment of literature teacher Father Manolo on guitar, who can't take his teary eyes off the young pupil. It's absurd, it's uncomfortable, but it's also touching. The reverie ends abruptly: Ignacio shouts “no!” as he out from behind the tall grass, with Father Manolo in hot pursuit, adjusting his robes. Paralyzing, wide-eyed fear abounds in these suggested scenes of sexual violence, but no anger. That would mar the boys' angelic faces. So it comes later-in Act Three-in the guise of the adult Ignacio, a self-loathing, heroin-addicted, pre-op blackmailer and thief.

The allusions to Vertigo and other Hitchcock films abound-not least in Almodovar's own Hitchcockian cameo as Enrique's pool cleaner. Alberto Iglesias's music for the film has all the suspenseful repetition and haunting lyricism of Bernard Herrmann's famous score. And, like Vertigo, Bad Education is easy to fault for its schizophrenia. But the virtue of films cobbled together from different genres is the multiplicity of perspectives they offer, despite unavoidable incongruity.

Act Three flashes back to 1977 for the denouement. Predatory Father Manolo resurfaces on the last day of shooting with secrets to tell and revenge to exact, adding yet another layer and perspective to an already fractured tale. He has since defrocked and reinvented himself as Senor Berenguer, a publisher and closeted homosexual whose wife leaves him when she discovers his passion for boys. He tells Enrique about blackmail and a murder, committed by lovers on a rainy night-about going to a movie theater showing Therese Raquin and Double Indemnity and thinking that the movies were about him.

Like all good femme fatales (and all great actors, for that matter), Angel has an uncanny ability to become whoever he's expected to be; Enrique and Berengeur both play along, eager to remake him in the memory of a long-lost lover. It's unclear who is manipulating whom, and who might end up, let's say, plummeting to his death from a bell-tower. Deceit, mistaken-identity, seduction, betrayal, murder-Angel proves capable of all these things, but it's hard to blame anyone for falling for it. This final act is as close as Almódovar could come to film noir, which is to say that despite the thematic and emotional darkness, every shot is full of color and almost completely absent of shadows.

And then the movie ends, just like that. The only corpse in the entire film was buried back in 1977-not even kept in the basement and dressed up like mother. The climax is in its retelling, in the slow discovery of the truth. And Almódovar has one final not-so-subtle dig on actors: we're told that the murderer goes on to achieve great success and fame as an international movie star. So the truth is without consequence. Regardless, Bad Education may very well be remembered as his Vertigo-a mess of a film that, in its improbable complexity and originality, achieves the rare combination of psychological suspense, and human pathos. In the end, Almódovar is more of a humanist than Hitchcock, which explains (even if it doesn't quite forgive) his film's quiet, frustrating conclusion; he refuses to give us the pleasure of heart-stopping certainty.