Mutual admirers, they hugged outside the Salle Lumière, the younger American president of the jury this year and the then fifty-two-year-old European more embraced in this country than in his homeland. Onstage together, minutes afterwards they officially opened Cannes. Director-screenwriters keenly conscious of past and present cinema culture, promoters of their own works and lives like countrymen Hemingway and Dalí before them, Quentin and Pedro are yet distinctly modern in single-name recognition once the province of Brazil’s soccer players. Further, Tarantino and Almodóvar burst on the scene with violence and irreverent caustic black humor, later went (some say) into decline for a while, but have recently done some of their most popular work since those heady early days.

The Spaniard’s Bad Education/La Mala Educación is the October 9 and 10 centerpiece of the current (2004) New York Film Festival and, through individual contract rather than blanket international studio distribution, scheduled for release a month later. Although he, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara and Gael García Bernal speak English to varying degrees of comfort -- the latter’s is excellent -- the greyer-than-his-photos control-all director dominated the press conference, as well, two-thirds of it in Spanish then translated by Festival selection  committee chairman and moderator Richard Peña.

Among the many works referred to during the discussion or in his films, Almodóvar pointed out the plot of Opening Night, by John Cassavetes, as an instance of the cruelty and pain throughout the creative process, potentially a “horrific” one in which actors “need the authoritarian director . . .[in that] the more asked of them, the more they give.” Martínez qualified the description, for “Pedro is not more demanding on anyone than on himself, so you demand more of yourself.”

Asserting that his three related rôles as Juan, Ignacio/Zahara and Ignacio/Ángel Andrade, a cruel gigolo, a high-heeled transvestite with firm breasts, and an unscrupulous neophyte actor, were all difficult from start to finish, García Bernal alluded to “cultural baggage [and to] the transvestite we all have,” implying that the other two characters were more “foreign to the real me” more difficult, to which Almodóvar had added the task of speaking Peninsular-accented, instead of the actor’s native Mexican-, Spanish.

This doubling or tripling of rôles and of personalities and even generations, reversed in the two separate actors (Daniel Giménez-Cacho and Lluis Homar) who portray the one character of Silesian Father Manolo-now-Mr. Berenguer, is of a piece with the director and actors’ describing the plot as “all these triangles coming together, like complex modern designs where one thing leads to another.” The film, in their view, finds essence when a 1964 school-love-abuse triangle is reestablished thirteen, then sixteen, years afterwards.

Its story as outlandishly involuted as the most rococo noir, and equally beyond full grasp or summary, “an anthology of all I’ve done throughout the many themes in earlier films,” Bad Education is not a return to them [although] I had to make the fourteen films before I could make this one.” Referring to his own “maturity, of a certain number of years” and to his family’s earlier migration within Spain for reasons of work, the director both admits and denies a strict autobiographical reading -- “intimate” was the exact word, though elsewhere non-autobiography “is plagiarism”-- and chose Mediterranean port Valencia (and Madrid and the northwestern Galicia) for its Barcelona-like openness of movida during the final years of the Franco-Falange dictatorship and the coming of constitutional-monarchy democracy in 1975. Nor does he intentionally transfer his early Catholic schooling. An agnostic nevertheless fascinated by Church liturgical ritual, he is not religion’s antagonist here, not the facile denouncer of sexual abuse at San Juan School, for Father Manolo is a “made-up character inspired by [in part second-hand stories of] two priests at school” and by another one “with a harem of young boys” who was reencountered a decade later in the capital. The film priest turned tortured husband-biological father and publisher is, in fact, for the director the most complexly interesting character, the “abuser/executioner . . . now victim in the roulette of passion.”

The earlier films that brought him fame, those roller-coaster marriages of reality and camp fantasy, with time have turned more somber and meditative, so that, with John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven cited as example, melodrama, romanticism and noir can be fused in Bad Education, with its ending “the toughest in any of my films.” That judgment, however, may well depend on which of at least two “narrators” is to be believed, the film-director-within-the-film, the ex-priest, the four-years-dead but impersonated aspiring writer, or the self-aware flesh-and-blood writer-director’s end-titles.

The actual script evolved over a decade, its endless “possible combinations” finally congealed only after shooting, editing and mixing, going back to a much earlier Almodóvar short story concerning a transvestite who tries to collect blackmail from the priests who had taught him. That was in mind for the Law of Desire episode in which free-spirit transsexual Carmen Maura returns to confront the priest who had loved her when she was a boy, and here it becomes the seed of Bad Education (which can equally be rendered, “Bad Manners” or “Bad Upbringing”).

Fussed over by lover-secretary Martín (Juan Fernández), rising Madrid filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) pores through la prensa rosa of tabloids, for inspiration for a fourth film. An unannounced visitor claims to be a bosom buddy from school years ago, and though the name Ignacio Rodríguez (García Bernal) is very familiar, the bearded young man does not resemble the face of memory. Now an amateur Bumblebee Group provincial actor, instead of a writer, Ignacio nevertheless leaves behind “The Visit,” an earlier story of his inspired by their mutual childhood schooling, brief gropings and love for movies. Narrated by junkie stage transvestite Zahara (García Bernal), the triangular story concerns the two boys and also their Catholic school Principal (Giménez-Cacho) in the future.

Simultaneously attracted and put off, Goded will adapt “The Visit” for filming, but Ignacio is adamant that he himself play Zahara and that his stage name of Ángel Andrade be used on- and offscreen. Rebuffed in these demands, Ignacio/Ángel leaves in anger, but from the ad on a cigarette lighter left behind, Goded investigates and learns that Ignacio died three years before but had a younger brother Juan.

Ignacio/Ángel reappears, offers unconditional rights to his manuscript, and asks for an audition because he has slimmed down while studying under transvestite queen Sandra-Nancy Doll (Sandra). The two young men become lovers, with each calculatingly seeking his own ends.

Interspersed with, emotionally and physically set against, the past, “The Visit” is readied and filmed. On the day of final wrap, a scene in which Ignacio/Ángel/Zahara is brutally killed and after which the actor cannot contain his sobbing, a stranger goes through still photos in the office. Catching him at it, the director recognizes in this Mr. Berenguer’s unshaved half-hysterical façade the older Father Manolo, who offers to reveal the truth of this puzzle. Once again, we go into the past, this time a mere four years back, to a mosaic-fronted apartment at Avenida de Agua, 11, Valencia, and to love and distracted passion, heroin addiction, transvestitism, money, blackmail and family . . . and perhaps to something approximating truth.

This is the “new” Almodóvar. And simultaneously the same-old same-old, a Rioja better sipped sparingly if one would not glut the palate. Playwright Edward Albee once confessed that “I seem to write about the same stuff. All writers have a couple of themes and that’s it,” and it is not negative to note that the Spaniard’s playful titles, bright primary colors and décors, the gays and transvestites, drugs and overlapping multiple personalities and subplots, the labyrinthine turnings, have been there from his start when the day job was at the national telephone company. Whether, as advertised, this filmmaker has come truly to grapple with demons of a Catholic childhood in a nation nominally of that persuasion, whether he pays homage to passions of sexually ambiguous duality as well as of cinema itself, whether he mainly tells a tale to some minds unnecessarily complicated, depends on the viewer. But he cannot be ignored.