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Shiner
Directed by Christian Calson
Starring Scott Stepp, Danny, Nicholas T. King, David Zelina, and Carolyn Crotty.
How to order La Mala Educacion
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
How to order

There is a great tradition of perversity in movies­ from the Lumiere Brothers' early film A Trip to the Moon (clearly made on some form of acid) to the great films by Luis Bunuel, such as The Exterminating Angel and Viridianna (informed by both surrealism and blasphemy), to Igmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Lars von Trier's Dogville, and even today, in Hollywood movies as diverse as Dude, Where's My Car and Freddie Got Fingered.

Certainly the films of Pedro Almodovar fall into that tradition. From his earliest efforts such as What Did I Do to Deserve This? and Matador through to Talk to Her, he has shocked, titillated, and, well, perverted his audiences. In his newest creation­ La Mala Educacion, which is translated as Bad Education, but is probably more accurately rendered as Miseducation­ he has, once again, surpassed himself in both perversity and agility of filmmaking.

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To simply give the plot of Bad Education is not so much to miss the point of the film as attempt the impossible, for this is a work that quickly spins out of narrative control. Bad Education begins with Enrique Goded, an avant garde film maker working with his assistant Martin on ideas for a new project. Suddenly an old friend from the past comes to his office: Ignacio, who now wants to be called Angel, is an actor and is looking for work. He and Enrique were, when they were boys in a Catholic school, very much in love with one another. Enrique has little interest in pursuing the past, but Ignacio gives him a story, "The Visit," he has written­ the first part based in their shared past experiences, and the second, fiction.

Enrique decides to film the story­ he is already being engaged into remembering and even reenacting events that happened 20 years earlier­ and of course, Ignacio demands that he has to play one of the leads. But this isn't the complicated part. Soon the past comes crashing into the present and it gets difficult to tell what is fact and what is fiction. At the heart of the film are the relationships that were formed at the repressive and out-of-control Catholic school 20 years earlier­ between Enrique and Ignacio, and also between the two boys and Father Manolo, a priest who is madly in love with the young Ignacio. But Almodovar is more interested in how his characters think about the past, and how they invent what might not even be their past. The film raises a number of plot-driven questions: Will Enrique and Ignacio get back together? What really happened at the school? How much truth is in the "fiction" section of "The Visit?" Who is seeking revenge on whom, and why?

Critics have said that Bad Education is Almodovar's homage to film now­ and it's true that it has aspects of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, Jacques Tourner's Out of the Past, and even Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. But the heart of Almodovar's artistic vision always emanates from the great films of Bunuel. It is not just Bunuel's anti-clericalism that Almodovar draws upon (in fact, despite his despicable priests, Almodovar finds some nascent innocence, or something, in Father Manolo) but his sense of the impossibility of ever escaping history. Most of Bunuel's career was a protest against the repressive, murderous regime of General Francisco Franco, and­ to a large degree­ Almdovar makes films under the same shadow. One difference is that Almodovar is able to now make his art in Spain, while Bunuel wasn't­ but at the core of all of Almodovar's films is the ever-vigilant presence of fear of history.

Bad Education is satisfying and frighteningly captivating. Its power is not in its entertainment or shock-value, but in how it makes us question how we think about what happened to us, or didn't, in the past.

Fun with violence

Christian Calson's Shiner is not as well-made or intellectually complex as Bad Education but it's just as perverse. Shiner had the most limited of theatrical releases­ a few festival showings­ and is out now on DVD release from TLA and well worth renting or buying.

Shiner has been hyped as a gay Fight Club­ but this is silly: Fight Club was the gay Fight Club and Shiner is actually more interesting. Centered around three dysfunctional couples, Shiner charts how violence and eroticism are inextricably intertwined and how it's near impossible to see where one begins and the other ends.

Tony (Scott Stepp) and Danny (Danny) are two straight guys who enhance their relationship by fag-bashing and beating on one another; Bob (Nicholas T. King) is a timid gay guy who is obsessed with Tim (David Zelina), a third-rate boxer who responds to Tim's attention with incipient violence; Linda (Carolyn Crotty) is a heterosexual woman who gets off on violence, as well, even if her partners seem confused by the whole thing.

Calson doesn't have a whole lot to say about all this, but he has a real knack­ this is his first film­ for getting under our skin. You get used to the physical violence here, but it's the emotional violence that makes a lasting impression. In a world in which so many gay-themed films are mealy pablum, Shiner is tough, smart, and perverse.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com