Movie Review – Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)
Written by Pedro Almodóvar and Yuyi Beringola
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

As he does in almost all his work, Pedro Almodovar delivered yet another provocative, gorgeous story centered on a woman and complications in her life. It would be easy to denounce this movie as “problematic” if you view art as a surface-level thing without facets and complexity. Almodovar is an exceptionally talented artist who knows this is a film about a profoundly gross relationship. The audience feeling unease throughout is intentional, and the ending is such a perfect note to go out on. The face of our lead shows a sudden realization through the haze of the intense bubble she’s been trapped inside. This is wrong, this is something very dark & twisted she’s trapped within.

Ricky (Antonio Banderas) has just been released from a mental institution after being deemed cured. His only goal now is to become the man in Marina’s life. Marina (Victoria Abril) is an actress who is finally garnering praise for her work. Years ago, she was a porn actress and struggling with drug addiction. It looks like she’s finally gotten things together and has her dark days behind her. It was during that period she slept with Ricky. He’s decided to make her his wife whether she wants to or not.

Meanwhile, Marina is dealing with a seemingly protective director on her new film set, who wants to take her to bed. Eventually, Ricky worms his way into Marina’s apartment, where he ties her up and says he’s never leaving. He will protect her, and they will be in love. Over time, the actress seems to be falling for him, but it gets much more complicated, and by the end, it’s hard to know how Marina genuinely feels about this nightmarish situation. 

Almodovar stated the film was his satire of heterosexual relationships, an exaggeration as to how he, a gay man, saw when men and women got together. You are missing the point if you walk away thinking Almodovar romanticizes any of this. The ick you feel watching Ricky bind and gag Marina, the way he believes his smothering fawning over her is the same thing a love is intended to unsettle us. I can see how an audience who hasn’t been taught media literacy could completely misunderstand this. Like all good art, Almodovar is not a didactic. He expects the viewer to intuit his intent, and we should be able to. At first, I felt a lot of unease, but I remembered who made this film. Almodovar cherishes women, so telling this story is his way of showing how shallow so many heterosexual men can be, lacking self-awareness of their actions and mistaking the wrong things for love. 

The film deconstructs The Beauty and The Beast narrative – the idea that all it takes is a good woman to “tame” a brutish man. What’s amusing is how often that trope presented unironically is accepted without a second thought. The audience applauds when this idea is framed as a “good thing” where everyone ends up happy. Almodovar presents us with something that is candy-colored and enticing, but if we examine it more closely, we find there’s something twisted and sickly beneath the surface. Almodovar is saying he sees heterosexual people as profoundly confused in their relationships, unable to read each other all that well, which is why a man might abuse a woman and think he’s doing something good while she can convince herself that perhaps, over time, he might change. 

The spirit of Hitchcock is definitely here. The music of Ennio Morricone feels like a score you might hear in one of Hitch’s pictures, alluring & romantic but changed in the context of the images it accompanies. The focus on a woman in peril and a psychotic man as the cause is straight out of his work, too. Where Brian De Palma seemed to only get the style of Hitchock, Almodovar has always gone further and brought the style but also rich, complex, challenging substance to thriller narratives. The director is very cheeky by folding allusions to the pillow talk pictures of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. He jolts us out of our complacency by juxtaposing those inoffensive, fluffy comedies with darker subject matter. Even we heterosexuals begin to look at straight relationships and realize how much goes unexamined and the amount of harm we shrug off as “part of a normal relationship.” 

Almodovar uses Marina’s film, The Midnight Phantom, as a meta-commentary on heterosexual romance. In the film within the film, the actress defeats her stalker and is no longer a victim. In real life, she ends up riding in a car and singing along with her kidnapper, and a sudden realization flashes over her face. A comment is made on the set about whether they are making a love story or a horror story. The director replies, “sometimes they’re indistinguishable.” A poster for Invasion of the Body Snatchers has a prominent spot in the director’s editing room while Marina watches The Night of the Living Dead during one of Ricky’s excursions to find painkillers for her.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a fantastic example of a film that demands we look beyond the surface. So often, films in the U.S. spoon-feed the audience tired of moral cliches without any artistic presentation. Here, we get a cautionary tale that isn’t afraid to be sexy, witty, and playful with genre. It’s a far more engaging experience than some dull finger-wagging narrative. Once again, Almodovar reminds me he is one of our cinematic masters, never failing to deliver a unique and splendid experience.