Pedro Almodovar
Légami!

Today, on the occasion of the upcoming Valentine's Day, forgive me, I wanted to dust off a staple of Spanish cinema.

“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” was, among other things, the launching pad for the actor Antonio Banderas, although he was already known and had two previous films with the same Almodovar under his belt. The two previous roles blend here, resulting in this character with a bit of the innocence of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and a bit of the madness of “Law of Desire”.

In the two films mentioned, Almodovar had already found the fundamental tenets of his cinematography in themes like passion and extreme relationships, which are kept in perfect harmony in this work without becoming too self-referential.

This character of Ricky is a boy who never had a family, going from institution to institution, as well as embodying the traits of a rebellious outcast searching for a normal, or even banal, life; his unfortunately primitive way of thinking leads him to kidnap a girl and keep her in his house, thinking this way he can convince her to marry him.

Even the victim, for her part, will recall having met him before when, finally convinced of her kidnapper's good intentions behind his clumsy ways, she agrees to make love with him.

The initially formal relationship between the two within such an extreme situation effectively imbues the film with the intelligent irony of which Almodovar is a master, but undoubtedly he himself recognizes that the film owes a great deal to its two protagonists.

The two, Banderas and Almodovar, would reunite to film “The Skin I Live In,” an undeniably unconventional and peculiar film, but one that perhaps suggests, not even subtly, that the two have had their time.