E-Mail This Article to a Friend Educating Gael Also: false notes in Johnny Guitar BY GERALD PEARY

Mexico’s Gael García Bernal has done some major globehopping since starring at home in Amores perros (2000) and Y tu mamá también (200l). He tooled through Argentina as clean-cut-kid Che Guevara in Diarios de motocicleta/The Motorcycle Diaries, then flitted about Spain in a tight dress and wobbly heels as Zahara, a pouty, drug-addled, hooker transsexual in Pedro Almodóvar’s current La mala educación/Bad Education, which opens in Boston next week.

"I looked in the mirror, I saw my mother," García Bernal, speaking last May at the Cannes Film Festival, said about Zahara. "I’m happy I looked like my mother, but also other ghosts came in, people I know, my cousins." Had he ever dressed before in drag? "I did it as a six-year-old," he laughed. His preparation? "I watched Pedro’s filmography, also Barbara Stanwyck movies, Marlene Dietrich, and a lot of camp Spanish films. The story is not my particular experience, it’s a peculiar Spanish situation I had to research: the accent, the way of speaking, this urge in Spain to explode after many years of things not being allowed, this stretching boundaries of freedom post-Franco, even though freedom doesn’t have any boundaries."

In La mala educación, Bernal also plays the straight-looking Ignacio (actually Zahara?), and he wanted to make it clear that neither characterization allowed him to coast and relax. "It was very liberating playing these parts, but both characters gave me the same degree of difficulty." Making the film in Europe, he observed how Spanish body language, both gay and straight, is so different from back home. "In Mexico, the movement is very Caribbean. In the Caribbean, you wouldn’t use your hand like the Spanish." He held out a hand and demonstrated a subtle cultural difference that was barely discernible to a New Englander!

Working with Almodóvar? "He knows what he’s talking about. He’s the best reference, the best encyclopædia to his films. Sometimes I’d think, ‘This is the biggest shit ever, it’s not going to work.’ He’d say, ‘Trust me.’ Then you felt you didn’t have to look out for yourself. He’d cut out the bad parts.

"Was this Pedro’s own story? I still wonder. I don’t think anything like that really happened to him. If it was his experiences, he played with them."

Was Zahara’s character so formed (deformed?) because she/he was abused when at school by a priest? "Pedro felt the character would be the same. But the law shouldn’t allow the priest to be an abuser, nor, because she’s a prostitute, should she be allowed to be raped. Whenever abuse occurs, it’s a crime. It should be punished. Pedro underlines this: even if the priest had feelings for the kid and good intentions, that doesn’t justify anything. It destroys the kid, and it destroys the kid spiritually. It destroys his faith.

"I didn’t go to a Catholic school but a normal government school. In Mexico, education has been secular since the mid 19th-century. Politics also. If a politician says anything about God, the people say, ‘No.’ There was a priest where I lived, he had kids, nobody even cared. It wasn’t even a sin."

Will García Bernal make more films in Mexico? "Of course! I live there! It’s not just Mexico but Latin America. I want to do something every year. I feel very much in touch [with my roots], that’s important. At the same time, if something comes from the US . . . or India!"

JOHNNY GUITAR: THE MUSICAL, which SpeakEasy Stage Company is presenting at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 18, was viewed kindly by local theater critics, and the New York production won the 2004 Outer Critics Circle Award for the Best Off Broadway Musical. But what if you come to the play as a devotee of the movie on which it’s based, the 1954 Nicholas Ray–directed Western? This film critic felt taken by what seemed to him a lazy, self-congratulatory local production, all winking and mugging in place of drama, and with even the sublime all-female shoot-out at the end of the movie (Joan Crawford versus Mercedes McCambridge) banished to off stage! Fault Nicholas van Hoogstraten, who’s credited with the book, though it’s mostly a literal lift of Philip Yordan’s screenplay. In smug interviews, he’s dismissed the movie as a "goofy film" and a "whacked-out Western. . . . They couldn’t have been serious."

Yes, they could! Johnny Guitar the movie is sometimes campy, but it’s also thrilling and transcendent, a work concerned with moral and political issues, and revered by such directors as Scorsese, Bertolucci, Wenders, and Godard. And the new musical score? Bah! Nothing comes close to the great Victor Young theme for the movie, which is sung by Peggy Lee.