LIKE Tarantino, fellow writer-director Pedro Almodovar likes to introduce his audacious movie making in the grand manner. "Un Film De Almodovar", he announces, sure in the knowledge that a Cannes opening film carries the status of an event.

For those still unaware of the likes of Talk To Her, All About My Mother and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, here is a brief education in the camp, teasing work of this Spanish director and former cartoonist and experimental theatre maker. He likes to tackles the big subjects: religion, Catholic guilt, life, death, crime, sex, sexual crimes in school, transvestism, love, lies and abuse.

Bad Education crams them all into its twisting, disjointed 105 minutes that add another ingredient to the Almodovar canvas: his homage to that classical cinema format, film noir.

Almodovar says he has constructed his homoerotic melodrama as a work of multiple stories involving a triple love triangle, with each story hidden inside another in the manner of Russians dolls. What's more, the stories can be divided into real, fictional and film with in a film, and so Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind looks like the two times table by comparison.

The triangular format involves two boys and a predatory schoolteacher priest, and the interweaving stories are spread over three time scales, beginning in 1980 with what you suspect is an autobiographical element to the tale.

Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) is a new-wave film director seeking inspiration for his new movie, when into his life for the first time in 16 years comes his first love, Ignacio Rodrigues (Mexican flavour of the moment Gael Garcia Bernal).

Or at least he says he is Ignacio, who is now a jobbing actor and prefers to be known as Angel Andrade. With him he brings a script that recalls their schooldays' abuse by Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), and he says he wishes to play the role of transvestite Zahara in the film and will do anything to secure the part.

Bernal, the dark-eyed star of cult Mexican hits Amores Perres and Y Tu Mama Tambien, gets to play three roles, two male, one 'female' and he lives up to Almodovar's billing of being a "very attractive as a man and a woman".

Yet there are serious points amid the dazzling gloss of the convoluted Bad Education, not least a sting in the tale as to Ignacio's true identity. Everything is transient, even identity, and so life is destined to go awry. A good lesson from Bad Education.

Bad Education was scheduled to open at City Screen, York, today. However, it will now open on June 11.

Updated: 16:27 Thursday, May 20, 2004