Any greedy cinephile, after only a number of casual viewings of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, may be forgiven for feeling he knows the man as well as the film-maker. A director who is not afraid to put his psyche on show, Almodóvar is unique in daring to be himself. His particular trademark is that his projects are consistently bold, at times excessively so, until such intimacy can seem garish. Almodóvar’s personality betrays itself most obviously in the plot lines of his movies – strange brews which necessarily twist around certain preoccupations: the modern marriage: infidelity (especially within the family); unrequited love or lust: dementia: extrasensory powers; household gadgets; nymphomania; murder; rape; sleeping pills; Middle Eastern terrorists; drugs, sex and mambo.

This patchwork of subjects is visualised with a gaudy glamour of primary colours and cartoon-like delirium. No wonder David Thompson described Almodóvar as ‘one of the most welcome explosions of the Eighties’. He has since become the most famous chronicler of the new Spain, a valued and celebrated icon. Almodóvar is a case apart – a worthy and colourful addition to Faber’s near-monopolistic series on directors meriting the status of auteur. Such recognition is perhaps overdue. Almodóvar is the product of influences varying from Cocteau to Wilder, Hitchcock to Fassbinder. The natural heir to the social satirist in Buñuel, he derives his visuals from the Hollywood musicals of the Fifties. Almodóvar’s style, overtly kitsch, and at his best generously portraying gaiety hand in hand with tragedy, moved Gilbert Adair to dub him ‘the archetypal postmodernist film-maker’.

In the case of so distinctive a character, whose work seems inseparable from his sensibility, it is a great loss that all discussion of Almodóvar the man was off the record. Frédéric Strauss suggests that this was ‘an easy rule to respect’, as ‘a cult of the original cannot escape caricature’. Beyond Faber’s (almost obligatory) cover photo of the director smoking a cigarette, the content is thus sadly restrained. Without the particular flavour of Almodóvar’s personality, his spirited, campy humanity, the book would rarely rise above the level of subjective critique. Strauss signally fails to redress this balance in his introduction:

There is one thing missing from this book – the voice of Almodóvar himself, its colourful, animated intonations bringing to life the smallest anecdote, capable of transforming it almost into an epic. A sensation which gave these conversations all their sense.

This is Faber’s series at its most ordinary, a glossy, indulgent appreciation, with Strauss at times verging on the sycophantic. While duly hailing Almodóvar’s success, he explains away his flops rather in the manner of Orson Welles on his own ‘flawed masterpieces’.

Almodóvar’s education in the Seventies pop-art era and his trainee years in the Madrid underground scene are conscientiously spelt out, but insufficient prominence is accorded to the culture and counterculture, the influences of comic strips, fashion and adverts from which grew ‘the Spanish Andy Warhol’. Similarly, discussion of his works errs towards the general. Matador becomes his ‘most abstract film’ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown his ‘most limpid film’, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! his ‘most incendiary vision’. The book’s main value lies in Almodóvar’s comments on his improvisational style and how his scripts evolve, while the best passage of all is his saga, concerning a paraplegic basketball player, of a film he never made.

More than any other contemporary director, Almodóvar is a true original. The trouble with this book is that it is likely to reassure those who regard him as, at best, a marginal film-maker, when its role should be to silence these more condescending critics. Rarely touching Almodóvar’s humanism, and bereft of the ‘blood, fire and flamenco’ which fuel his art, Strauss’s lacklustre book fails to paint a sufficiently vivid portrait of this most psychedelic addition to the Faber stable.