Boys in the dark

Pedro Almodóvar's fine new film is a serious-minded story of young boys enduring abuse, writes Michael Dwyer

The superb new Pedro Almodóvar movie first made the headlines in France two months ago when the country's largest cinema chain was forced to withdraw its trailer from all cinemas showing The Passion of the Christ. A Catholic fundamentalist group, the Brotherhood of St Pius X, had objected to the trailer for the film, which pivots on a story of clerical sex abuse at a boys' school in the 1960s.

Contrary to their fears, Almodóvar's treatment of this theme and its consequences is subtle and measured. Now in his 50s, the gifted Spanish writer-director continues to move further away from the kitschy camp of his earlier features. His new film is as serious-minded as its immediate predecessors, All About My Mother and Talk to Her, and substantially less melodramatic and, unusually, all about men.

In Almodóvar's partly autobiographical screenplay, one of the protagonists is a gay young film director in 1980s Madrid - Enrique (Fela Martinez), who is seeking a new project when an unexpected visitor (Gael Garcia Bernal) offers him a script.

This handsome young man introduces himself as Ignacio, Enrique's closest friend at school who has changed his name to Angel to further his ambitions as an actor, and volunteers to play a transvestite in the film.

The screenplay is based on the childhood experiences of Enrique and Ignacio at the school where the manipulative Fr Manolo jealously separated them to prey on Ignacio.

Almodóvar astutely adopts classic 1940s film noir as the model for this complex but enthralling and wholly accessible drama that is immensely stylish in its design and visual compositions, and accompanied by a brooding score that recalls the Hitchcock soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann. There is an even more explicit nod to Hitchcock in the movie's resonant references to his masterpiece, Vertigo, as the plotline twists and turns with impeccable assurance.

In a very fine cast, the outstanding performance comes from the remarkable young Mexican actor, Bernal, as both the enigmatic Angel and the troubled transvestite of the film-within-the-film.

Michael Dwyer's interview with Gael Garcia Bernal is in tomorrow's Weekend Review