MEET THE NEW IT BOY

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE YOUNG ACTOR IN BAD Education knows it is the role of a lifetime. After all, he says, the scenario he has just presented to a famous director is the story of his own life. Who better to play the leading part? Yes, the main character is a drag queen but, he tells the director, "if I look too manly, I can slim down." Pride mixes with desperation as he adds, "I'm very flexible. I can do anything."

The young actor playing the young actor in Pedro Almodovar's new film also has a myriad of faces to wear--a transvestite chanteuse, the wreck of an abused child, a caring brother, a furtive lover capable of murder. But that's no great stretch for Gael Garcia Bernal. The budding Mexican star has convinced audiences he can be a dog-loving street punk (Amores Perros), a priest tortured by love (El Crimen del Padre Amaro), a randy teenager on a spree (Y Tu Mama Tambien). In The Motorcycle Diaries, which just opened, he incarnates the young Ernesto Guevara, soon to be Che. Bad Education follows in November, and after that, who knows? The kid from Guadalajara, Mexico, is high on Hollywood's muy caliente list, though he has yet to make a film there. But the future is limitless for an actor who can do anything.

If you don't go to films with subtitles, or didn't read the gossip columns that detailed his romance (now ended) with Star Wars' Natalie Portman, you probably haven't noticed Garcia Bernal. But if you saw him on screen or in person, you'd pay attention. He has the face of a streetwise seraph--luscious lips that break into a mile-wide, million-dollar smile; green eyes sending out searchlights to communicate with the stranger across from him; a gentle intensity that turns a conversation into a blend of confession and first date. All this has caught the eye of some of the world's sharpest directors. "I think that Gael is one of the best actors of his generation," says Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles "and will be for some time. His strength lies in the fact that he knows who he is and what he wants."

Gael (pronounced guile) knows what he wants, all right: the good education of an actor. "What's cool about acting," he says, "is the opportunity it gives you to be always learning, always preparing. It's a very beautiful path of knowledge." But these days Garcia Bernal finds it hard to catch a breath. "I'm 25, and I still cannot say how my life is," he observes with a charming, disarming bafflement. "I feel like I have nowhere to rest. I think about having a dog but know I can't, because it's impossible with this life."

Life has to be busy for the man who helped make Latin movies the hot dish in world cinema. From Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, filmmakers have created works of whirling vigor, social conscience and a visual style just this side of surreal. And in these films audiences see compelling actors. Often in Almodovar films--Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem got early spotlights in them.

"A film movement cannot develop solely on the efforts of directors," Salles says. "Italy had great directors like Visconti and Fellini but also actors like Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina. Now in Latin America you have Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu [Amores Perros] and Alfonso Cuaron [Y Tu Mama Tambien] but also a generation of young, talented actors such as Gael." Garcia Bernal realizes his good fortune: "Destiny and luck have given me and many other actors the chance to be in a certain position where no one else has been."

In 2001 Bardem's performance in Before Night Falls made him the first Spaniard nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. This year there could be two nominees from Spanish-speaking countries: Bardem as a paraplegic who persistently petitions for euthanasia in Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside and Garcia Bernal in ... take your pick.

The son of theater actors, young Gael was often picked for roles in their productions--"playing around," he calls it. "I knew I was supposed to act," he says, "but not as a professional." An improbable chain reaction triggered his career. At 17, he was studying philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico when a strike was called. He decided to take a trip. The cheapest European tickets were to London, so he went there, got a job as a barman and began studying acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Before he graduated in 2001, he took time off to shoot Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Garcia Bernal attacks each role with ardor and exhaustive research. Preparing to play the young Guevara, he says, "for four months we were reading all the biographies, meeting people that met him, interviewing his family, studying leprosy, studying the economic and political cultures of Argentina and Peru. I went to visit where he was born, to get the blessings of the gods."

In tracing the journey of Guevara from restless child of the upper middle class to abettor of the Cuban revolution, the movie runs into dead ends of sentiment (the little people Che bonds with include a gorgeous leper) and nearly sinks in bathos (he swims a wide river for one last visit to the leper colony). It's all to demonstrate the radicalizing of a guerrilla hero. "We wanted to show where Che came from and where he was going," Garcia Bernal says. "So finding the tone was very delicate, like fine embroidery." Certainly his participation is faultless. He brings to the role a winsomeness and dawning wisdom. Before your eyes, a boy grows into an angry young man.

Garcia Bernal has that boyish quality; even when he dresses up for a film premiere, he looks like a kid in Dad's duds. The child behind the man--that's a theme in Bad Education, in which the main character is a homosexual plotting revenge for his childhood abuse by a priest. The actor playing that character must juggle many identities, and Almodovar saw that ability in Garcia Bernal: "The script demanded someone who would be absolutely desirable both as a woman and as a man, who would be spontaneously virile and not be grotesque when the role was that of a transvestite. From the first tests, Gael was the one who was physically successful in both roles."

Almodovar's tactic, as always, is to put extraordinary creatures in extreme situations while lavishing sympathy on every character, including the evil ones. The actor who'll do anything for a role; the director, an expert at manipulating people; even the priest, who is often as pathetic as he is predatory--all express the film's thesis that love can be a form of abuse and, occasionally, vice versa. Weaving sad headlines about the pedophile clergy into a plot that suggests James M. Cain as filmed by Hitchcock, the film dexterously dances across four time periods and leaves the viewer to determine whether any one scene is reality, memory, fantasy or movies. One thing, however, is certain: nobody makes movies with the brio and gravity of Almodovar's. Bad Education is a cooler film than the director's two recent masterpieces, All About My Mother and Talk to Her, but it's one magnificent melodrama.

Director and star tussled over the approach to the film's "heroine." As Garcia Bernal says, "My inner transvestite is much more Caribbean, and I wouldn't have thought of doing some of the expressions I do in the movie, which are much more Spanish." But whatever the on-the-set spats, the results are spectacular. Whether sporting a macho beard or a cascading blond wig, Garcia Bernal makes his character sexy, annoying ... fully human. Almodovar sees that cocktail of emotions in the actor: "What I like about Gael is that mixture of innocence and passion, tight secrecy and tenderness, sensuality and unconsciousness."

Now he can spread that complicated charisma on a bigger stage--if he wants. "I'm pretty open to work anywhere in the world," he says, "including the United States, of course." He recently made an indie drama, The King, set in Texas, in which he plays William Hurt's son. He is reputed to have turned down some big Hollywood roles, though he won't reveal which ones, "because that's not professional to say." But he is ready for his American close-up and at ease with his impending eminence. "Some things you can control, like the performance you give. But stardom is just a consequence. It's not important, but I am able to enjoy it,"

Whether he enjoys it or not, it looks inevitable for the young man who can do anything. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Toronto

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Toronto