I saw
La Mala Educación/
Bad Education in England, and I must confess I don’t know quite what to think. I need to see it at least one more time before I make the genius/junk call, I think.
Still, in the long and somewhat unsatisfactory
profile of Almodóvar by Lynne Hirschberg in this week’s
New York Times Magazine, Gael García Bernal complained about being forced to disguise his Mexican accent for his role in the movie: "He wanted a Spanish accent and that is a colonialist thing. The Spanish accent sounds like … Flemish to me. But Pedro is a very specific person with a very personal point of view."
Where to begin? Peninsular Spanish as Flemish? Total crap—unless, perhaps, García Bernal is channeling his inner Dutchman. And it hardly seems like cutting-edge verisimilitude to insist that a character who’s supposed to have grown up in rural Spain wouldn’t talk like someone from 6,000 miles away! That character already has problems establishing his identity—a foreign accent would sure help a lot.
