Setting is not the only thing he’s inverted. On a more fundamental level Live Flesh dares to alter the whole dynamic of the original, leaving its protagonist Victor (Liberto Rabal) no longer a recidivist rapist, and wholly innocent of the shooting for which he was imprisoned. That incident left policeman David (Javier Bardem) confined to a wheelchair and, six years later, married to Elena (Francesca Neri), then a drug-addict and Victor’s supposed victim. Feeling slighted, Victor vows revenge.

A revenge that involves him (with typical Almodóvarian logic) learning how to really please a woman in bed, thanks to former flamenco dancer Clara (Angela Molina), the abused wife of David’s ex-partner Sancho (Jose Sancho). And landing a job at the children’s shelter where Elena works. This all quickly established, Almodóvar then slowly revolves around his five principals (circles are the abiding visual motif), moving inexorably towards tragedy and redemption.

The most obvious thing to say about Live Flesh is how little it owes to the camp over-design and superheated melodrama of Almodóvar’s earlier work. He is quite possibly incapable of making a naturalistic picture as such, but this film certainly finds him skirting its borders. It is hard to reconcile the humanity evident here with the grotesques of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! or the extended comedy rape in the tiresome Kika, say. Instead, this is the film that his last, the little seen but genuinely emotive Flower of My Secret, hinted he was capable of. His treatment of the disabled David, now an Special Olympics basketball champion, is one of the most sympathetic and unpatronising in recent cinema.

And like Flower, this is a quiet, subtle piece that looks for its drama from within character. All of the players are good, with Rabal particularly so as the brutal looking but badly wronged Victor, a young man born into bad luck (literally, aboard a Madrid bus, earning both him and his mother lifetime passes), but shit out of any when it counted most. For all its ludicrous premise, in these hands Victor’s seduction plan is never played for laughs.

Look too for a hint towards a more direct political stance than we’ve seen before. Almodóvar has previously called himself ‘of the Left’ and noticeably pays a debt to Buñuel by casting Molina, who made her debut in his 1977 farewell, That Obscure Object of Desire, and by playing a lengthy clip from the surrealist master’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz plays under the initial shooting. New Almodóvar, new Spain. The film opens, in 1970, in those dark fascist days, and ends in the glow of the post-Franco era with new optimism and a second birth. ‘Fortunately for you, son,’ the child is told, ‘in Spain we stopped being scared a long time ago.’