Ah, what a fresh breath of Madrileño air. After two laborious trudges through melancholy epics with my last two picks, it’s refreshing to return to something light… if you consider a certified psychopath kidnapping a former porn star “light.”
This is only my second Almodóvar outing after covering the soapy dark comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, so I’m far from an expert, but I’ve already noticed patterns familiar to most Almodóvar aficionados. These include his love of theatrical melodrama, his twisted humor, unconventional love stories, and unapologetic use of color. Almodóvar does everything he can to hold your attention.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which has a fun double meaning: “I tie you up like you’re my hostage, but also want to get married, i.e., tied down,” is about Marina (Victoria Abril), an actress trying to break away from her past career as a porn star and transition into starring in a horror movie for a wheelchair-bound legendary director (Francisco Rabal). In comes Ricky (Antonio Banderas), a smoldering but clearly unhinged young man recently released from a psychiatric hospital. How smoldering is he? So much so that he had an affair with the hospital’s female director.
Ricky heads straight to the film studio where Marina works, driven by a previous encounter. During one of Ricky’s past escapes, he met Marina at the height of her drug use, and the two had sex. Ricky has since obsessed over the encounter, convincing himself that Marina is the love of his life. After catching her one night outside the studio, only for her to not remember him, Ricky kidnaps Marina and ties her up in her own apartment, hoping to force her to fall in love with him. Almodóvar gives a clever explanation for Ricky’s reasoning right here:
“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is essentially a love story, or rather a story of how someone attempts to construct a love story in the same way as he might study for a degree: by means of effort, willpower, and persistence… When you have nothing, like my main character, you have to force everything. Including love. Ricky has only (as the flamenco singers say) the night, the day, and the vitality of an animal.”
Tonally, the film rides the line between comedy and horror/thriller. It’s no mistake that the film-within-the-film, The Midnight Phantom, which Marina stars in, is a horror movie about an obsessed killer. Ricky is the ultimate creep, and yet we sympathize with him. Obviously, casting Antonio Banderas is a big part of why we’re #TeamPsycho, but even then, Almodóvar challenges the audience to question how they should feel about this budding “relationship.”
Speaking of #Team Psycho, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Ennio Morricone’s score, which pays direct homage to Bernard Herrmann’s original Psycho soundtrack. The tingle of late-’80s strings gives the film an offbeat, campy feel that’s a lot of fun. It seems weird to use “fun” to describe a movie about a psychotic kidnapper, but what can I say? It’s fun!
The end of this movie is unhinged. I don’t like to spoil how these Criterion films wrap up, but I’ll tease that the “relationship” between Ricky and Marina doesn’t end the way you’d expect. And that’s what I love about the two Almodóvar films I’ve seen so far: he doesn’t follow conventional rules for plotting or character arcs. He likes it messy. He likes it complicated. And the result is a creepy, campy slice of “light” entertainment.