THE credits roll: un film de Almodovar. Not Pedro Almodovar but Almodovar, note. This is not ego, nor even supreme confidence in his status as Europe's master director of today. Rather, Almodovar has become a trademark.

This is not to imply that the Spanish writer-director has fallen into the land of the clich, the compromise and the stereotype, merely that the characteristics that pervade his films are more in place than ever but are now handled with maturity to accompany the visual wonder and maverick wit and sexual frisson. Like a painter, by adding depth, his characters shine more luminously.

Where once he flashed like an arthouse comet, writer-director Almodovar now makes moving films with a slow burn (the kind of perfect cigarette yet to be invented). Talk To Her moves as lethargically as a hedgehog on the nocturnal road: appropriately the protagonists, Benigno and Marco, begin in seated positions, strangers sat next to each other in the darkness of plush theatre stalls, watching the enervated dancing of a pair of dying human swans.

This is a painfully beautiful, haunting scene up there with the best of Almodovar: a scene that moves Marco to tears and Benigno to wishing he could express his feelings to a man who interests him as much as the dance.

Months later, their worlds are to criss-cross with more permanence at a private clinic, where they forge an unlikely friendship, brought together by chance and misfortune. Loner Benigno (Javier Camara) is a young nurse, tending daily to a comatose ballet student (Leonor Watling) with a love and attention to detail that is as ambiguous as an unclear road sign. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is a taciturn Argentinean travel writer and investigative journalist, whose girlfriend, loose-cannon bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores), ends up in the clinic too, in a coma, gored by a bull.

The bloody theatre, yet grace and symmetry of bullfighting are filmed with typical Almodovar brio, the goring a symbol for a piercing of the heart in a story of loss, loneliness and regret.

Camara and Grandinetti's performances hum with rare spirituality and intensity, and Almodovar adds to his impressive canon of troubled female characters. Better still, he no longer fires titillating cheap shots for outrage: a silent-movie scene of sexual frankness has the ring of poetry to accompany the shock of the nude.

Updated: 10:02 Friday, August 23, 2002