MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’: The Flip Side of Passion and Desire

Pedro Almodovar must be doing something right. His new film “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” was initially rated X by the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s ratings board--a sure sign in these doggedly censorious days that the movie must be remarkable.

Released unrated by its distributor after an unsuccessful appeal to overturn the X, Almodovar’s movie is remarkable, all right, but it’s not the lurid S&M; fantasia one might expect from all the hoopla.

With Almodovar, whose last film was “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” if he isn’t offending his audience he’s not succeeding as an artist. He’s a director who pulls his art out of the outrageous. But his daring, the way taboos pop up with jack-in-the-box-like suddenness in his movies, is only a part of Almodovar’s originality. The true outrageousness of “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (Westside Pavilion) is that he takes an almost comically retrograde and “politically incorrect” premise and then deepens it, makes it emotionally valid.

Ricky (Antonio Banderas), who has spent most of his youth in reform schools and mental institutions, is released into the world of “normality” at the start of the film. His desire, his fixation is to persuade Marina (Victoria Abril), a former soft porn actress currently filming a third-rate horror film in Madrid, that he is her fated mate. Ricky seeks a normal life, complete with wife, kids and a steady, boring job; when Marina, whom he tracks to her apartment, cringes at his advances, he subdues her and ties her to the bed. She becomes his prisoner, as he waits patiently for his passion to be recognized--and returned.

Almodovar uses this enforced pair-off as a demonstration of his reigning theme: If you want grand passion in your life, you must be willing to accept the dire aberrations that come with it. For Almodovar, ardor is all. In “Women on the Verge,” for example, one of his heroines was hopelessly in love with a Shiite terrorist; the film’s position was that it was better to have an overwhelming amour with a terrorist than no amour at all.

That’s also the point of “Tie Me Up!” You could almost call it a polemic, except that Almodovar is too frisky a film artist to churn out a message movie. Ricky, his face so imploring he seems aghast, says to the shackled Marina: “When will you realize no one will love you as I do?” In moments like this, the film achieves a truly cracked lyricism. Antonio is loony, he’s a kind of terrorist himself, but since Almodovar operates in a universe where passion is paramount, Ricky’s question to Marina comes across as a love ode.

How does Almodovar turn what should have been a horror story into a love story? For one thing, he doesn’t turn Ricky into a rampaging monster; his tenderest moment is when he replaces Marina’s binds with a softer rope. Marina, who, in addition to her porno past is also a semi-recovered heroin addict, isn’t exactly an innocent. She’s been around long enough to recognize that Ricky’s ardor is, in its own fashion, pure. What may finally attract him to her is that Ricky recognizes her purity too. When they finally make love, unbound, their passionate intimacy is the film’s emotional turning point, and the soft, rapturous music on the sound track cues us to celebrate the coupling as a spiritual victory. (The love-making isn’t graphic but it’s prolonged, which no doubt explains why the ratings-board’s bluenoses were bent out of shape.)

The potential horror of the sexual relationship is also defused by Almodovar’s subtle insistence that Ricky’s and Marina’s situation mimics the standard marital model. They quarrel over the same petty things that “regular” couples do. If Marina has been brainwashed into loving Ricky, still, the film seems to be saying, isn’t all romantic love a kind of brainwash? Their parrying is a predictor of what their married life may be like, just as, earlier, the sequence that we see from Marina’s grade Z horror movie, with its captive heroine and masked intruder, predicts Marina’s subsequent ordeal. For Almodovar, there’s no clear demarcation between real life and popular melodrama. They’re all part of the same giddy continuum.

It’s a partial letdown that Almodovar doesn’t play around with these continuums a bit more. The film’s cramped scenario, which may remind some people of “The Collector,” doesn’t allow for the pop explosiveness of Almodovar’s earlier films, or his delight in urban ghastliness. The cast is fine and full of familiar faces, and in Loles Leon, who plays Marina’s sister, Almodovar has almost found a giddy substitute for his muse, Carmen Maura, the actress who starred in most of his films, including “Women on the Verge,” and from whom he’s since been estranged. But “Tie Me Up!” is essentially a two-character piece, and so the large cast never gets a chance to jangle together; parts of the film seem crypt-like, uninhabited.

There’s a hushed, rapturous quality to its best parts, though, and the emotional interplay between Ricky and Marina has a scary immediacy that the movies rarely achieve. Almodovar dares a lot in this film. Starting from a base of craziness, he’s launched a cockeyed paean to normalcy.