Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) review

Freshly released mental defective Ricky (Antonio Banderas in his native tongue and loving it), armed with a little money and the dream of starting a family, kidnaps (and roughs up) a B-movie actress and former porn star (Victoria Abril, a little too clean to be so dirty) he once had a fling with in order to make her love him by any means possible. As a splendid black comedy approach to a blasé romantic set-up, this is a perversion of the male fantasy of forcing/convincing the idealized object of desire to return that desire - Almodóvar takes this quite literally, playing around with the idea of the male/female relationship as being stereotypically regarded as a master-slave dichotomy (although I'd question whether this is a feminist approach, Almodóvar can never be considered a misogynist). Banderas and Abril are both committed enough to their roles to make this semi-plausible and Almodóvar is freewheeling and irreverent - it took a second viewing for me to notice that the look on Abril's face at the end as she drives into the sunset isn't that of complacency or even bliss, but more along the lines of, "What in the hell have I done to deserve this?" Oh, Pedro....