First-class Education

After years of damp-squib opening nights, Cannes Film Festival kicked off not with yet another clanking French costume drama or a below-par Woody Allen comedy, but with something grown-up and deserving: Bad Education by Pedro Almodovar.

Still reeling from last year's attacks on the event as the worst ever, the organisers clearly want to get serious.

Almodovar is famed for his complex plots, and in Bad Education exceeds himself with a triple whammy. In the main story, set in Madrid in 1980, a director is visited by a boyhood friend with a script about their Franco-era school days and the pupils' abuse by a priest. This becomes a film-within-the-film which, in turn, includes an extended flashback.

Recently the director has shifted his focus from women to men, and Bad Education also majors on male angst, male love, male sexuality, male friendship. The result is not perfect: the plot's shapeshifting structure makes it hard to engage emotionally and the blank-faced Fele Martinez is not a hero to warm to.

But Gael Garcia Bernal has a ball with his treble role and, as the transvestite character which is virtually a staple of Almodovar's films, looks fabulous in a blonde wig.

The director has, at 52, not given up being a bad boy. He was in hot water for attacking the former Spanish government's reaction to the Madrid bombings. Although his humanism is evident here, in his compassionate portrait of the paedophile priest, trailers for the film were pulled from French cinemas under pressure from Catholics (they preceded The Passion Of The Christ, which perhaps did not make for ideal double-billing).

But internationally Almodovar's status is secure, as one of a select group of auteurs whose name alone is enough to sell a movie. Twice an Oscar-winner (for All About My Mother and Talk To Her), he has segued from king of kitsch to mature and respected director without muffling his anarchic temperament, hard-hitting themes and colourful signature style.

Bad Education might have slipped down smoothly last night with the red carpet crowd and the world's highbrow critics but when it opens in Britain next week it will also speak to the ordinary audience.

Bad Education (La Mala Educacion)
Cert: 15