LOS ANGELES (CA)
Sun-Sentinel
By Anne-Marie O'Connor
Los Angeles Times
Posted December 27 2004
"Churches always give me such a feeling of peace," says Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar as he strides through a Catholic house of worship in Los Angeles. "Sometimes I wish I was a believer. Imagine coming to a place where you kneel down, recount all of your sins, and you are pardoned. Imagine how wonderful that would be. It is a marvelous invention."
The unburdening of a long-held secret and its mortal consequences is a central thread of his latest film, Bad Education, a drama fueled by sexual tensions in the Catholic Church that stars Gael Garcia Bernal as the "homme fatale."
For Almodóvar, Bad Education is something of a dark departure, a foray into film noir that he says is informed by the hard-boiled style of dated cinematic police thrillers as well as by the more ponderous meditations on power in The Godfather.
"The idea of the Mafia is something very close to the church, and I'm not the first to allude to that. If you remember, in The Godfather you see the power of the Church and the Vatican. In The Godfather, the church is treated like a kind of Mafia," says Almodóvar.
With a story driven by the transgressions of a pederast priest, Bad Education is "not exactly autobiographical," says the 52-year-old Almodóvar -- but it does draw on memories of his boyhood church school, where he said a priest molested a score of his classmates.