Pedro Almodovar is one of the greatest living film directors, the rightful heir to Hitchcock’s throne with his mix of psychosexual driven dramas and an innovative storyteller who delivers uniquely crafted narratives. When Hulu notified me that his films were going to expire and be removed on June 20, 2017, I decided to watch all his films, including the ones that I already saw. This review is the ninth in a summer series that reflect on his films and contains spoilers.
I think that I saw Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! before this summer. Surprisingly to me, it is Almodovar’s most controversial movie. If a naked beautiful woman can’t sway Roger Ebert (RIP) into giving it a good review, nothing can! It is a genre-bending story, a thriller horror love story. Another director, even Paul Verhoeven, could not convincingly depict the love. The film follows a man, Ricky, played by Antonio Banderas, Almodovar’s favorite madman. Ricky is discharged from an insane asylum. He immediately takes what and whom he wants to create a life for himself in the outside world. Will this real life be the one that he dreamed or just Stockholm Syndrome? Usually Almodovar’s opening scene has the viewer question whether or not what we are watching is real, but in this film, while we still question the relationship of the first scene to the rest of the movie, throughout the entire film, the viewer has to question everything and ask ourselves if Ricky is right.
With Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Almodovar seems to be playing with the Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s quote, “To be sane in a world of madness is in itself madness” or Akira Kurosawa’s quote, “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.” Ricky is Almodovar’s most sympathetic madman. Ricky is clearly bonkers: he steals, threatens, kidnaps, hurts others then demands empathy all while calling it love. He seems like a delusional sociopath. He adheres to no rules and is only in service of one goal: to get a specific woman, a woman in a magazine, to love him. He is a constant threat to others.
For me, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! feels like the unofficial sequel to Law of Desire if a certain character did not die. Ricky is a madman, repairman, knows no boundaries and attracts people who intellectually know that he is a danger. The main difference between Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Law of Desire is reciprocated love, which is what makes this film controversial. His victim later remembers their one-night stand and falls in loves with him. Instead of true love’s kiss breaking the curse that made her forget the past, it is sympathy and consensual, passionate sex that breaks the spell of drug addiction, sexual exploitation, pain and loneliness for his victim, Marina, a former porn star, relapsing drug addict and hopeful soon to be scream queen in horror films. Ricky frames himself as the one that needs to be saved from a life alone, but as the film unfolds, it is revealed that she needs a literal obstacle, her imprisonment, to escape her psychological prison and physical pain (an alleged tooth ache). In most Almodovar films, drugs and madness are important themes, but they are rarely equated.
They save each other, but only the madman punctures the fiction of the world by questioning the rules of society, remembering everything and seeing things accurately. By the end of the film, his reprehensible actions are retroactively vindicated and are reminiscent of cult deprogramming, and his fantasy comes true. For Almodovar, in films such as Volver, The Flower of My Secret and All About My Mother, returning to a character’s home village is an empowering, restorative moment. In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, they abandon the real world, the city, which only offers them horror and violence, real (pharmacist in a nightie and a gun in is holster, the drug dealer and her two heavies, Ricky’s physically violent interactions with women) and fictional (Midnight Phantom, the horror movie which Marina stars in). It is as if the city is a fallen place that warps all natural relationships and places an estrangement curse on its inhabitants: the interviewer and the actor, the director and his wife, the director and Marina.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is one of the rare films that does not hold the artist’s life up as a model of how to live well. Like Broken Embraces, the director is making his last film, but unlike that director, he knows it, and his obsession with his leading lady is not reciprocated. This director shares more with Penelope of The Odyssey than with any of Almodovar’s other director characters as he daily unweaves his story and refuses to complete his film. He has the mistaken belief that like Scheherazade, he will live if his story never ends, but unlike her, he is wrong. He is a pathetic figure, a director who cannot make a film, a cliché dirty old man who is obsessed with a young, vibrant woman, but not as she is. After the last scene in his horror film is shot, they have no connection. He talks to her answering machine while she is listening, literally tied up, which is a favored narrative device in Almodovar films, miscommunication. This is the world that Marina escapes from: death, an inescapable cycle of exploitation, the illusion of success and being desired for her image.
Only Lola bridges the real world and the mad world in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, but these worlds cannot intersect until madness completely confronts reality. The real world, the director’s world, tries and fails to bring fantasies to life, fails to connect to people in the real world other than casually cruel ones and has a vital mind, but a body of death. (The bad guy in the director’s movie explains that he has a body full of life, but a face of death.) The mad world makes fantasies real, violently connects to people in the real world and has a warped mind, but a body of life. Lola has a vital mind and a body of life. She is completely practical, but not divorced from passion. As a producer, she is responsive to current conditions, is flexible and make things work. She’ll help her sister escape a mad man, but also take her to meet the mad man and get him reintegrated into society.
Almodovar usually equates Catholic iconography as a tongue in cheek joke to retroactively explain an event as miracles thanks to prayer. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is one of the few films that does not explicitly use the dialogue to poke fun at miracles, but uses icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In the beginning of the film, the soundtrack has a heart beat and then there are three card of the same image of memory over three images of Jesus with the caption of “The Holy Heart of Memory.” When Ricky ties up Marina, there is a painting of Jesus as a shepherd leading sheep over her bed. I believe that the non sequitur opening scene actually connects to the second neighboring apartment where Ricky takes Marina and they finally connect. I am not a Catholic and would welcome any insight into the iconography used in this film and its symbolism.
Almodovar seems to be challenging society’s values and forcing us to ask ourselves about the less sensational or violent aspects of our lives that are equally as soul killing as being held in captivity by a stalker that you once cared for and forgot. Ricky pulls a warped Snowpiercer by taking her out of her routine of work and self-medication, makes her remember how to survive and fight and remind her of what she used to want, which apparently was him. During one confrontation, she screams at him that she never asked him to take care of her, but the implication seems to be that after an escape and their initial liaison, Ricky was recaptured and returned to the asylum so maybe she did ask him, and he did not keep his promise, or at least, he owed her a follow up. The past is ephemeral, and only a madman, an unreliable narrator, remembers it. How awful is Marina’s world that she forgot the love of her life? I’m a little surprised that critics do not ask this question more often. When she does not remember him, she never stops fighting him, never pretends to feed his ego by feigning attraction and even after she remembers him, she escapes because she was kidnapped, beaten, tied up and threatened. In Almodovar films, of which Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is the rule, not the exception, a madman can credibly love someone and behave in a criminal manner, and a person can be repelled by the madness and still be in love.
There are no gay or transsexual characters in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! that I am aware of, but it is the first time that I recall seeing any people of color in an Almodovar film. There are two black men discussing election results then Ricky approaches them to buy drugs. I will not be awarding a side eye to Almodovar for this stereotype since all his films involve his characters using drugs, but for those familiar with ethnic demographics in Spain, does he deserve one? This film was in theaters in 1990, and it has been 27 years since I saw another one (to be fair, I have not seen all twenty of his films).
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a must see film for Almodovar fans, but it is his most controversial movie and is understandably offensive to those who equate this story with the overwhelming numbers of real life horror stories of men who feel like they own a woman because he had sex with her once. I think that the keys to this film are escape, consent and reciprocal love.