TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! - #722

Yet another film in the long list of titles I learned about through Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on “At the Movies,” though one I had not seen up until now. I would have been a senior in high school or a freshman in college when Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! would have been released, and it would have likely been a little too perverse for me, farther off the beaten track than I was ready to go. I was still only dabbling in foreign films, had not seen a Pedro Almodovar picture, and was a bit skeeved out by the clip they showed of the toy scuba diver swimming between a woman’s legs. That’s, of course, the most infamous scene in Tie Me Up!, the one that tested the MPAA system and helped lead the way to the NC-17 classification.

Now that I’ve seen the film, that’s one of the least disturbing elements. At least in that little bit, Marina (Victoria Abril) is enjoying herself and having fun under her own volition. In fact, it’s the last moment of freedom, really, before a man of another kind will invade her life.

Marina is an actress who has just completed filming a movie. It’s a good time for her. Prior to this, she struggled with heroin addiction and starred in adult films. It’s these past issues that will give her friends and family cause to worry when she disappears, but also indicates the darker aspects of her personality. It was likely on one of her drug-fueled benders when she first met Ricki (Antonio Banderas) a year prior, himself on one of his many escapes from a mental institution. The 23-year-old is out again, but this time legally, having been cleared for regular life. His first order of business is to find Marina, follow her home, and trap her there, kidnapping her and holding her hostage long enough for her to see what kind of a guy he really is and fall in love with him.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a strange movie. Its subject matter is dark and serious, but its execution is practically frivolous. I suppose the best indication of what kind of genre Almodovar is attempting is signaled by the on-set scenes for when Marina is making her own film within the film. Almodovar is having a metafictional lark here, poking fun at himself and his reputation as a director who favors women, but he’s also calling attention to the odd, uncategorizable nature of Tie Me Up!. The film Marina is starring in is “a spin-off of the horror genre,” and so it is with Tie Me Up!. It is a sexualized Misery, with maybe Ricki channeling a little bit of Humphrey Bogart from The Desperate Hours. The fact that Marina escapes her would-be lover (and also killer) in the fake film by strangling him with a phone cord is a bit of misdirection. It’s Marina who will be tied up with a cord, and eventually she won’t be looking for revenge. Ricki’s plan works. Stockholm syndrome sets in, and Marina ends up loving her captor.

It’s hard to imagine Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! being made today. Or at least being released via any mainstream channels. There’s plenty of gross stuff ending up going straight to disc, but most studios would balk at a film that opens with its hero being released from a mental hospital, stalking a woman, and then becoming her lover with no consequence. Almodovar approaches the scenario with a macabre glee, teasing us with the trappings of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller but then going deep to really get down into the muck of it all. His trademark Technicolor fetish lends Tie Me Up! a bizarre surreality, almost as if Marina and Ricki are in an otherworldly wonderland where his sick fantasies lose their dangerous edge. In a similar fashion, the music by Ennio Morricone toggles between sinister Bernard Hermann-esque themes and more grandiose Hollywood swells. Are we watching a beautiful romance or Norman Bates being let lose to pursue his vision of Madeleine Elster?

The young Banderas is pretty incredible here, cat-like in his predatory movements, but then strangely sweet. He hints at the broken little boy that still lurks somewhere underneath all this grown-up desire. He also has a smoldering sexuality, the quality that had Madonna chasing after him in Truth Or Dare, which would have been shot around the same time. He’s handsome and charming but also just downright weird. In a way, his brokenness fills in the fissures of Marina’s own fractured personality. She exudes sexuality right from her first scene, when she decides to forgo wearing underwear because the lines will show; as a performer, Abril is absolutely comfortable in her own skin, and so she manages to show Marina as someone completely attuned to her own pleasure. As her anger dissipates--aided a little by her lapse back into drugs, it should probably be noted--we can see how she would come to crave the intensity of Ricki’s affection. Almodovar keeps her wrestling with her feelings right up until the end. She can’t make up her mind whether to go along with Ricki or to break out.

And as a viewer, you won’t always be clear on her intentions, either. Even up to the last shot, where for a second it appears Almodovar might borrow from The Graduate [review] and end on an ambiguous expression, I was ready to believe she had realized she had made the wrong decision. The momentary jitters help salvage a final sequence that is maybe a little convenient a turn of events, the director unable to resist giving in to his more melodramatic urges and tacking on a quick resolution.

Yet, it may also just be the act of a prankster. There are a lot of playful gags littered throughout the movie. Banderas outside the sweet shop window with the “O” in the sign over his face and looking like a diver’s mask, the S&M-like garb of the villain in the horror movie, Marina captured between Ricki’s spread legs when he’s standing on his head just before he turns her whole existence upside down--Almodovar’s subversion of conventional sexual imagery is key to subverting our own expectations of what makes a healthy relationship. Holding hands is replaced by handcuffed wrists, and a kidnapper might fix your plumbing (and not just metaphorically). If we were entirely comfortable with it, the trickster would be deprived of his fun. It suggests Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! maybe owes as much to John Waters as to Alfred Hitchcock. We should never stop laughing any more than we should stop guessing.

This is Criterion's first foray into Almodovar's filmography, and hopefully it won't be the last. With a crisp, colorful high-definition transfer and a well chosen selection of extras, including new interviews with the cast and crew, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is an excellent presentation, bringing the singular Spanish director into the fold of a singular company.

This disc was provided by Criterion for purpose of review.

EATING RAOUL (Blu-Ray) - #625

I remember the print ads for Eating Raoul from when I was a kid. Even in black-and-white in the newspaper, the big lips seemed somehow dirty to me. I really don't know where or how it would have landed on my radar as such, maybe the ad copy made that clear, I just knew this film was somehow subversive. It never came up in my family's discussions about what movie we were going to go see, and we went to just about everything. Just not Eating Raoul. This avoidance carried over into the cable years, when it seemed to be scheduled fairly regularly on Cinemax. 

So here it is some 30 years later and Paul Bartel's cult comedy has come to the Criterion Collection and I am seeing Eating Raoul at last. My curiosity was definitely high. When Paul Bartel, who also co-writes and stars in the picture, died in 2000, the praise for his work was effusive. Sometimes it just takes the rest of us some time to catch up.

Though, now that I've seen Eating Raoul, I'm not entirely sure what it was that garnered that praise. What was subversive in the Reagan era, I have to admit, now just seems quaint. For a black comedy about sex and murder, Eating Raoul is shockingly tame.

Bartel plays Paul Bland, a snobbish wine connoisseur with sexual repression issues. His wife Mary (Mary Woronov, a former member of Warhol's Factory) is a nurse who attracts all kinds of unwanted attention. She gets groped by horny patients and skeevy bankers alike (the latter is a nice cameo part for Buck Henry). The Blands want to open up their own restaurant out of the city and get away from the perverts of the sexual revolution that they find so loathsome. As fate would have it, the swingers they hate so much turn out to be their solution to their money woes. When one breaks into their apartment and attacks Mary, Paul kills him with a frying pan. The dead man is carrying a lot of cash in his wallet. If they can attract more of his kind, maybe the Blands could get enough for their down payment.

The pair place an ad in the local rag advertising themselves as s&m masters, all part of a plan to lure the would-be clients to their apartment, bonk them on the head with the pan, and take their money. When another crook, a thief named Raoul (Robert Beltran, Star Trek: Voyager), stumbles onto their scheme, he offers the Blands a deal: they provide the patsies, and he will dispose of their bodies and their possessions (clothes, cars, etc.), and they'll split the extra cash he makes. This works out pretty good at first, until Raoul's charms, aided by some premium marijuana, lure Mary over to the dark side the married couple so disdain.

Eating Raoul is an intentionally scandalous send-up of social mores, with its sites aimed clearly on the opposite sides of the sexual divide. Bartel and co-writer Richard Blackburn (Lemora) parody both the squares and the swingers with equal venom. The Blands are uptight snobs who are living in denial, while the party animals they slay are twisted and deluded. The net the writers throw over their comedic prey encompasses not just sexual hang-ups, but also how race and class informs the Blands' drive to get what they think is coming to them. In terms of satire, Eating Raoul has the most in common with the John Waters school of comedy. Bartel and Blackburn sprinkle their script with slang for outrageous sex acts, and they invent increasingly elaborate role-play scenarios for Paul and Mary's victims. One is a Nazi, another likes Minnie Mouse, etc.

What Bartel's film lacks, however, is Waters' gleeful reveling in all things nasty and outrageous. Eating Raoul is missing the quintessential tackiness and the anything-goes abandon that have allowed movies like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble to maintain their edginess. Hell, even minor John Waters flicks like A Dirty Shame does the icky sex stuff better. Seeing that sex-crazed comedy had me running Urban Dictionary in overtime just trying to sort out everything referenced in the script. (Can anyone say, "upper decker"?) Maybe Eating Raoul really blew their hair back when the dweebs and the norms watched it back in 1982, but it just seems silly now. The music is outdated, the costumes and sets look cheap, and the big punchline that Bartel is building to...well, I hate to tell you, but the spoilers couldn't be more out in front of this one unless Bartel turned his title into a complete sentence.

I guess it was still kind of neat to see what all the fuss was about after all this time, but if you don't have the same nostalgic connection to Eating Raoul as I do, you might wonder if it's called a "cult movie" because once upon a time audiences were brainwashed into thinking that Eating Raoul was so outlandish. 

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were provided by the Criterion Collection and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.