Ireland might seem unrecognisable today from its days under the thumb of the Catholic Church, but despite our penchant for playing the perennial victims we are not the only country to undergo such a transformation. Spain, for its part, has come a long way since the repressive days under Franco, and Pedro Almodóvar is one of the people responsible for speeding up the process of liberalisation. His playfully camp and scatty style embraced gay culture and progressive portrayals of women on film. He has since grown up as a filmmaker (he's got the Oscars to prove it), taking on some weightier issues but has lost little of his gusto.

There can be few weightier and more controversial issues than that which he tackles in his latest effort Bad Education, which opened this year's Cannes Film Festival. Clerical abuse has been treated recently in Irish cinema in such painfully earnest and worthy fare as The Magdalene Sisters and Song for A Raggy Boy, but Almodóvar brings his unique playfulness to what is still a hugely thorny issue, not least because of the influence that the church still maintains in Spain.

Almodóvar bizarrely brings an arsenal of noir conventions to bear on what is essentially a realist melodrama about two childhood friends who reunite to make a film about their traumatic experiences in a church-run boarding school. From the Hitchcockian credit sequence to the 40's-inspired soundtrack, the film is structured as a film noir but looks and feels like nothing of the sort. The noir conventions are pursued right down to the femme fatale but as this is an Almodóvar film about homosexuals, the femme fatale is a transsexual played by the scarily convincing Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal. Almodovár maintains the traditional male gaze of 1940's cinema but casts it seductively on male bodies, thus drawing attention to the fact that, outside of Diet Coke ads, the female gaze is still a rare beast.

The film plays interestingly with the stock artistic concerns of identity and Art versus Reality. The plot hops around the timeline and alternates between what is real and what exists as part of the film within the film and, perhaps inevitably, little is what it seems. The scenes in the boarding school are undeniably powerful, particularly those portraying the young boys exploring their sexuality. The narrative does ramble slightly in places and the more dramatic noir plot twists sit uneasy at times, but this shouldn't take away from what is probably the first entertaining and enjoyable movie dealing with clerical abuse. Trust Almodóvar to pull it off.

Hugh Travers