By Dennis Harvey

PHOTO BY DIEGO LOPEZ CALVIN/COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES

Born in 1951 (five years later than Waters), Almodóvar had the strangubational inspiration of Franco Spain to rebel against. Waters – also raised Catholic, although less hysterically so, I presume – was flinging dung against the softer targets of Eisenhower America, Nixonian disillusion, and even hippie sanctimoniousness. It took a more liberal culture to allow Waters's "assaults" against complacency, his drag-queen gorgons offending everybody as much as possible through 1977's Desperate Living. Hairspray (1981) – the movie-cum-stage-musical-cum-about-to-become-a-movie-again – was a first step toward cultural supremacy that also turned out to be his last one to date.

At about the same time, Almodóvar was erupting like a paisley cancer on Spanish propriety in 1982's delirious Labyrinth of Passion and the next year's nunfest Dark Habits. Then followed the hits. I value them less – full-exposure Antonio Banderas notwithstanding – than such underrated '90s transitional works as Kika, The Flower of My Secret, and Live Flesh, all melodramas purple with ironic glamour and shameless voyeurism.

Nonetheless, these films constituted an awkward phase that gay audiences, as well as growing straight-art house ones, wondered about. "Is Almodóvar going to sell out?" one demographic seemed to ask. "Is this gay or what?" another mused. Both weighed in: just how much does he mean it?

Alas, they got their answer. All about My Mother and Talk to Her are among the most U.S.-beloved foreign-language movies of the past few years. Both are beautifully crafted, and their diamond-cutting care to extracting the most picturesque suffering from various protagonists strikes me as Susan Hayward-style cinema elevated to a level that might very well be mistaken for Art. That's a minority opinion. But really, do we need Almodóvar to make films about the delicate emotions of everyday people? No. We need him to keep on making movies about style, about florid melodrama, and about other movies.

Which is pretty much all Bad Education is "about." This is a lurid, contrived, gratuitously sexy (especially homo-sexy) thriller with a smirk on its face and a cigarette holder sinking hot ash into the shag carpet. It's so exquisitely – and derivatively – designed that it for sure qualifies as "mature" Almodóvar, albeit a case of such I can really get behind. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also his first movie in years wherein characters do get some behind.

The beaky Fele Martínez plays Enrique, a successful writer-director looking for ideas for his next film – by scanning tabloid newspaper stories, of course. He's interrupted by one Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), who announces himself as Enrique's lost-lost Catholic boarding school buddy. Enrique is delighted, if also a tad puzzled – he really doesn't recognize his old friend. But then, it has been 16 years.

Ignacio is now an aspiring actor and, natch, this isn't just a social call. He's got a short story he'd like Enrique to read, maybe even adapt as a movie. It starts as a jaw-droppingly crass portrait of transvestite performers-prostitutes-addicts Paca (Javier Cámara) and Ignacio's Zahara, who aren't above robbing the sacristy at a small cathedral to support their various habits. When the more glam (and venal) Zahara picks up a hunky trick to rob, she realizes, as she's rifling through his wallet, that he is in fact her onetime childhood love – named Enrique.

Later elements of the story (all staged as a film within a film) strike the "real" Enrique even more nonfictionally, particularly this flashback: two 10-year-old boys at a repressive Catholic boarding school fall in love, but the more angelic-looking one is lusted after by principal Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who manages to separate them forever by sending the little angel into a tailspin straight toward showbiz-transvestite prostitute junkiedom. Blackmail, murder, and other crimes ensue.

Once he decides to collaborate with Ignacio, present-tense Enrique begins to slowly warm some suspicions toward his newfound "old" friend. Is he being had? Then again, just who's exploiting whom is a complicated matter here, since Enrique soon makes full, vigorous use of the traditional casting couch.

It's to Almodóvar's credit that this film noir-black comedy makes us perversely root for the roto-rooter in that particular sexploitative dynamic. Even more so that he manages to make priestly pederasty – take a deep breath now – so funny. Father Manolo's early scenes are like Death in Venice as staged by Waters – a Waters who became more like Douglas Sirk-cum-Todd Haynes, that is, and a lot less like the guy who made this fall's infantile A Dirty Shame.

These outrages amuse rather than offend because the scenarist-director layers in so much irony, deadpan camp, and cineaste in-joking – and because the Chinese-box structure of flashbacks, fantasies, alternative versions of events, etc., eventually turns all notions of victimhood upside down. Though be warned: the one thing this movie is truly serious about is offending the Catholic Church. Those who can't separate the biblical message from its institutional messenger will break out in hives by the second reel.

Bad Education is also a luxurious homage of sorts to Hitchcock, from its Saul Bass-style opening credits (by Juan Gatti) to Alberto Iglesias's extravagantly Bernard Herrmann-like score and Jose Luis Alcane's sleek wide images. Rather than a Hitchcock blond, we get the equally pretty García Bernal in a role that's really three distinct roles – drag included – and that stretches his range far beyond the prior demands of Y tu mamá también, Amores perros, The Crime of Father Amaro, and The Motorcycle Diaries.

Somehow one doubts Che would have approved. But before the revolution, there must be decadence, satire, and subversion – areas Bad Education masters so completely that it might've delighted Trotsky, who did have a sense of humor. It's heartening not just that Almodóvar has re-embraced bad taste, but also that he's now mature enough (Waters, take note) to embrace it with a connoisseur's discrimination. 'Bad Education' opens Wed/22 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.