Film: Is this man the last auteur in Europe?

F or Pedro Almodovar, Spain's famed film-maker, success is the best revenge. Eleven years ago his precision-tooled farce, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, was rejected for competition at Cannes. This year his masterly melodrama All About My Mother, considered his best work, won him the best director prize and the festival's only standing ovation.

It is a long way from the dusty plains of Almodvar's native La Mancha to the fleshpots of the Croisette. Still sometimes dismissed in Britain as kitsch or camp, Almodovar has travelled in 20 years, and by way of 13 features, from no-budget grunge to high-gloss art film, and from shameless hedonism to sober reflection on the price of pleasure.

How, then, did a poor boy from the Spanish provinces come to be the reigning king of European cinema, inventing on the way a trendy, urban image of Spain? It is a journey inseparable from Almodvar's personal biography, as it is from the dramatic changes in Spain since the death of Franco.

Born in 1948, Almodvar's childhood was by all accounts grim. In post- war La Mancha (think Middlesbrough) men were silent and sometimes violent, women vulnerable but voluble (Almodovar has said that for him all stories begin with women talking together in the street). Young Pedro was an "extra- terrestrial" there, obsessed as he was with Hollywood and high fashion. Abused by his teacher priests, Almodovar lost what faith he had and has not ceased to condemn the church. It was a working-class background that taught him hard work and gave him a hard-nosed attitude to money, at odds with the wacky persona he later invented for himself. But it also brought him the three great themes he was to explore in his films: female solidarity, the wilder shores of sex, and the legacy of Catholicism.

Hightailing to Madrid, Almodovar had his Sixties in the Seventies. The explosion of pop, painting, and performance known as the movida, influenced by British punk though lacking the original's political edge, was in full flow, and Almodovar fell in with a surrogate artistic "family".

In spite of this cultural effervescence, he could hardly have picked a worse time to make films. At the start of the Eighties the national film school had been long closed and the Spanish film industry was in free-fall, swamped by foreign features previously banned by Francoist censors.

But Almodvar's first features courted the new and neglected youth audience with a precisely calculated outrage. In Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), a staid housewife is seduced by a teenage punkette: in Labyrinth of Passion (1982), a nympho- maniac is desperately seeking the son of the Shah; and in Dark Habits (1983), lesbian nuns give refuge to a nightclub chanteuse on the run.

So far, Almodovar was an outsider artist, shunned by the Spanish establishment, while adored by his minority audience. Bigger budgets, however, led to sleeker, more ambitious projects - What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), The Law of Desire (1987) and Matador (1988). These earned high grosses in Spain, and critical plaudits abroad.

From abroad, too, came a loyal, gay following after his only film to focus on homosexual men, The Law of Desire, widely believed to be autobiographical. Fiercely protective of his private life, however, Almodovar rejected the "openly gay" label hung around his neck by US fans and critics and claimed the film was about family. In any case it showcased to best effect his regular team of actors (including Antonio Banderas), and marked the first film produced by his own production company, El Deseo (Desire). Steered by his brother, Agustin - recently voted one of the top 10 producers, worldwide - this fearsomely efficient company enabled Almodovar to make a new film every year, in a regular rhythm equalled only by Woody Allen.

Newly secure financially, Almodovar went on to his greatest popular success, Women on the Verge ... (1988). Mechanically precise in its plotting, the film crystallised the distinctive Almodovar "look", much imitated in the 1980s - clashing colours, flashy camera angles and flagrantly artificial studio sets. In a typically eclectic gesture, Almodovar based his sentimental farce on high and low culture references. Like Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine, Women lent a starring role to the telephone; and like Jean Negulesco's How to Marry a Millionaire, it had wisecracking dames on a penthouse terrace - a homage to Monroe, Grable, and Bacall. As a love letter to Madrid, Women also helped to reinvent the once-dowdy capital as the essence of modernity.

Then, suddenly, Almodovar lost his way. The magazine Vanity Fair wrote in December 1989 that one of the things that wouldn't be missed in the next decade was Pedro Almodovar movies. And the film-maker seemed keen to prove them right. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1989) was lost in a factitious controversy over sexual violence and the damaging X certificate imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America. High Heels (1991) was a maternal melodrama overshadowed by references to Douglas Sirk and Lana Turner. Kika (1993), was a fascinating failure and saw Almodovar, one-time enfant terrible and master of outrage, rail against the sensationalism of the newly deregulated Spanish TV system.

As Spain's long-lasting Socialist government became mired in corruption and the national mood turned dark, the glorious Eighties seemed long past and with them the film-maker most associated with that hedonistic period. But Almodovar responded by reinventing himself for the Nineties. Ditching the crazy comedy, he turned to more serious storytelling - with The Flower of My Secret (1995), and similar sobriety in Live Flesh (1997), a fatal tale of five lovers, addressing disability and domestic abuse. Most recently there is All About My Mother, a daring take on the story of Christ.

It is no accident that this final trilogy makes explicit allusion to social and political issues which Almodovar had previously refused to acknowledge. Embracing the victims of drug addiction, Aids, and prostitution, Almodovar implicitly sends a rejoinder to the rightist government of the People's Party, which succeeded 13 years of Socialist rule in 1996. The PP had lost no time in attacking the Spanish cinema sponsored by its predecessors and in dismantling what remained of the subsidy system that had first allowed Almodovar to work with such success.

Again a prophet without honour in his own country (he has won more prizes abroad than in Spain), Almodovar was outspoken in his defence of the Spanish film industry against the government.

Once, Almodovar said he couldn't wait to go out of fashion so that he could become a classic. With the magnificent All About My Mother he shows he can have it both ways. Shamelessly chic, he has also produced a lasting body of work, while other promising directors of the 1980s have fallen away. And if his personality is warm and witty, his professionalism and perfectionism are precision-controlled; he is, for instance, a writer- director who actually finds the knick-knacks for his sets.

Such is the steely determination that took him from La Mancha to the lonely place where he is today - the last European auteur in a world dominated by Hollywood.

'All About My Mother' (15) opens on Friday