AT THE END of the narrow sloping street which houses Pedro Almodóvar’s office is one of the biggest bullrings in Madrid. I want him to escort me to an early-evening fight in the hope that he might rant and rave. But Spain’s most famous film director is suffering from cluster migraines and too much media exposure. Time is something he doesn’t seem to have. His latest film, Bad Education, opened within hours of the Madrid bombings and frankly should have sunk like a stone.

“In Spain, we’re used to living with terrorism,” says Almodóvar, soberly. “But this was something else. If the objective was to create psychological fear then it succeeded brilliantly. It was a terrible moment.”

Bad Education — a comic thriller about bribery, the Catholic Church, abuse and obsession — defied the grim public mood to become an unexpected box-office sensation. The melodrama is driven by Fele Martínez, a thrusting young film-maker who falls in lust with a ruthless actor and Mexican heart-throb, Gael García Bernal. It’s Almodóvar’s first proper tilt at film noir, and it’s as fatalistic and beautiful as anything he has put on screen. It’s also the first Spanish film to open a Cannes festival.

Despite the pink cardigan, the 53-year-old director looks alarmingly formal in his tastefully cluttered glass box. I was expecting a showman as flamboyant and camp as Boy George. Instead I meet an accountant with chubby hands and hairy knuckles. The electrified hair has faded to a statesmanlike Clinton grey. The brown eyes are thoughtful and sombre.

The effect is heightened by the presence of a smartly-dressed interpreter.

The Cannes opener is a seriously big deal, and Almodóvar is not taking the responsibility lightly. France is his biggest market — “much bigger than Spain” — and the Croisette adores him. Last year he eschewed the ubiquitous tinted limo and rolled up to a red-carpet gala on the back of a motorbike. He was applauded every foot of the way. “I refuse to be overly modest,” he says.

“Bad Education deserves to open the festival, even though it’s a tough film and not the glamorous kind they traditionally choose. Everyone realises last year was a disaster. By picking my film the festival has signalled a genuine desire to change direction.

“Cinema is like farming. There are good yields and barren years. I think this is going to be vintage. There are five or six films I really want to see, including Emir Kusturica’s Life is a Miracle; Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, and Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl (which Almodóvar helped produce).”

This new mature Almodóvar is a far cry from his wacky 1980s self. He is more sensitive about taste, more rigorous about form. He is the Vivienne Westwood of Spanish cinema: an old punk whose films are now pressed and marketed like expensive designer suits. Bad Education is quite simply the best three-piece ensemble he has ever tailored. Better, I would argue, than either Talk to Her or his 1999 Oscar winner, All About My Mother .

It’s also his most autobiographical film, and fascinating if only for that. Almodóvar is famously private, and the film has been gestating for so long that the director wasn’t sure whether he would ever actually make it. “It’s devilishly complicated,” he says. A “spider’s web” is how one Spanish critic described it. Set between the 1960s and 1980s, the film charts the desperate obsession of a priest, Father Manolo, with a young school boy, Ignacio. Jealous of the boy’s friendship with a fellow classmate, Enrique, the priest expels his pubescent rival.

Sixteen years later, Enrique, now a trendy film director, is paid an unexpected visit by a dishy young man claiming to be Ignacio, and later by a spooky elderly man who says he’s Father Manolo. The former wants Enrique to shoot a troubling film about how he blackmails a paedophile priest. The latter owns up to a murder.

It is homosexual film noir at its most fatal, as black as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Fritz Lang’s Human Desire or Otto Preminger’s Laura. The characters act like moral rotters, although Almodóvar is careful not to judge them.

“They take risks, they are ruled by their impulses and they pay a high price,” explains the maestro. “I’m not judging whether someone like Father Manolo is good or evil. Of course abusing a child is criminal, but he is also in love and suffering immensely. My intention was to show how a character who abuses his power in the 1960s — a very dark and repressive time in Spain — can become a victim of love in the liberated 1980s.”

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