Matador is a film about sex.

Not sex as even the most liberal of us would admit to knowing it, but obsessive sex - palpable, intoxicating, self-destructive. Matador may be in Spanish with English subtitles but sex on any level is a universal language.

Nacho Martinez plays Diego Montes, the matador el Maestro. He walks with a limp, drives a Mercedes and his chiseled features are reminiscent of a Latin Jeremy Irons. Women would kill for him, if not on account of him.

Diego hopes to mold a young trainee toreador, Angel Gimenez, played with gusto by Antonio Banderas, who reminds him of how he once was, passionate and altogether fearless. Diego teases the young man about his virginity and, feeling sleighted, Angel rapes Diego's girlfriend. After a rush of religious guilt, Angel heads for the police station where he not only confesses to the rape, but falsely admits to a number of recent murders.

A pretty and young defense attorney, Maria Cardenal, played by the vivacious Assumpta Serna, takes on Angel's case. However, she sees her involvement with the young prodigy as a way of getting closer to Diego with whom she shares a mysterious, mutual interest.

Maria, we discover, is a lot like the character in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, who is also in search of the ultimate orgasm transcending all others. Maria has avidly followed Diego's bloody arena career and admits that, at the moment of sexual climax, she imitates him using a stiletto-shaped hairpin as her picador's lance.

Other than a videotaped recording, there are no scenes of actual bullfighting in this picture. Human beings become, in effect, the bulls of Deigo's trade. "Women are like bulls," he instructs Angel. "Once you close in on them, it's easy." And sex, if it is to be exciting, must lead to death.

Maria gets her kicks from skewering her unsuspecting sexual partners in the throes of passion. And, similarly, Diego cannot hang up his sword upon leaving the ring. He still finds the nape of the neck a wondrous place where life ends and death begins.

The obsessive marriage of sex and death has never been made more apparent than in this film. Director and co-screenwriter Pedro Almodovar, whose previous credits include last year's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, should be credited for keeping these dark and dirty dealings amusing throughout. The film is always upbeat and attainable, and the director's ability to handle such primal themes with comedic resourcefulness is most invigorating. This is not something one would expect from a film which opens with a sense of its leading character masturbating to video images of women being tortured, beheaded and mutilated.

The only disappointment in the film is its reliance on a somewhat hokey denouement concerning psychic phenomena and an eclipse of the sun. This ending seems jarring and out of place in a film full of bizarre characters and less-than conventional images. But if you're in the mood for a stylish piece of erotica, then "Matador" should leave you panting for more.