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Pandora's Box Gael Garcia Bernal, playing Juan/Angel/Zahara is the centerpiece, the place in which the heart of this film resides, for it is his broken damaged heart that sets the tone and the focus of Almodovar's "Bad Education" And at the core of Bernal's tour-de-force performance is his shredded psyche: broken apart by years spent plotting revenge for the drug addiction and childhood abuse of his brother, Ignacio. Juan is one of the "damaged people" of whom Tennessee Williams so often writes. And Almodovar has chosen to make Juan not only a hero but also a heroine, the femme fatale, Zahara. Almodovar, never one to be squeamish or afraid of censure, is out for blood in "Bad Education" as he slices open and excises the sexual mores in Franco-era Catholicism in which child abuse was accepted as the norm. (Unfortunately, nothing seems to have changed much) Moviemaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) gets a visit one day from a man claiming to be Enrique's friend from school, Juan (Bernal) even though Enrique doesn't seem to recognize him as his Catholic school friend. Juan is very insistent that Enrique read a story he has brought with him. And it is this story that sets off a series of scenes into painful and disturbing memories about school, about love between boys, about hypocrisy among adults, about corruption in matters of the heart. Almodovar has a very keen eye for the American movies of the 1950's and "Bad Education" is drenched with the dark, foreboding, and passionate colors of a Douglas Sirk film. But this is a film which acknowledges the past but whose mindset is of the Now. Almodovar has made a thriller, a detective story but has done so with the heart of a romantic and he has used Enrique as his detective to try to solve the mystery that is Juan/Angel/Zahara. That Enrique finds out more than he bargained for is a given in an Almodovar film. That he unlocks a Pandora's Box of secrets, recriminations and corruptions and then quickly closes the lid to seal them up again signifies a filmmaker who is practicing the fine Art of showing rather than telling and explaining.