Now that a cork can never again pop innocently, or a train hurtle into a tunnel without the accompaniment of schoolboy sniggers, it's oddly endearing to see Almodovar trying to find new ways of manipulating an old language. In his hands, the gun fetish which American cinema has nurtured over the years is boldly challenged. In the days of the Hays Code, when love scenes were obliged to be chaste, film-makers communicated their characters' desires through encrypted images. In his new picture Live Flesh, he finds a balance between the two; he cranks up the heat, but keeps the pot from boiling over. This Puckish Spaniard, who looks like a clown but makes movies which rummage beneath people's painted-on smiles, has treated sexual tension with dreamy nonchalance (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) and emphatic hysteria (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). There aren't many other Melbourne furniture salesmen who've managed to cut the mustard in Hollywood.. He's an unashamedly commercial filmmaker who gets as big a kick from selling his movies as he does from making them "You've created something from nothing ...

and then you find buyers wanting to pay you a whole lot of money to show it in their country." As he holds court in his suite in the Hilton Hotel in Cannes, you realise that Khan is living out a wish-fulfillment fantasy. There are sensual films There are very sensual films And then there are films by Pedro Almodovar. Given that he always casts himself as the debonair, gun-toting mobster hero, he seems somewhat vain. His claims that he doesn't give himself an undue number of close-ups ring a little hollow Still, the Brits could learn from him.

By doing everything himself, he ensures that any profits made go into his own pocket.Cannes, Khan proclaims, is the one market on the festival calendar where it is possible to combine business with pleasure. Audiences don't appear to have noticed the difference.It is easy enough to mock Khan as a latterday Ed Wood His movies aren't exactly going to win critical plaudits. Half way through shooting, Khan was injured in a car crash, but although he was in bandages and could scarcely hold a gun, let alone fire it, he insisted on going ahead. As he reels off the statistics, he sounds more and more like an accountant.