Fine exercise with cinema and some Web search, of late; and some non-coincidences. I was watching again (but after a lot since the last time) a wonderful movie from our beloved Almodóvar. Átame (Tie me up, tie me down, 1989). The plot is simple: a guy just out of a mental health institution (Antonio Banderas) believes that to reconquest his previous lover (Victoria Abril) he just needs to sequester her for a while, for he’s sure she will eventually succumb to his power of seduction and his love. She is a porn-film worker who after rebelling a bit, will fall for the man.
Apart from the universal and contemporary theme of a woman being coerced by acts of violence to submit to a man; the stereotype that if it’s real love, then it will conquest the woman’s heart eventually; the dream of romantic love that needs to be pursued; that the ends in love affairs always is worth the means; and that in the end that relationships do have that battle and equilibrium-search of force and harassment and manipulation which contrast the sweetness. All this is set as a noir-ish against a backdrop of a film director shooting a film.
Bit Almodóvar loves to dress his scenes with objects from his own collections. So, there are three moments where he shows and quotes three films:
First, there is Night of the Living Dead by J. Romero (1968) from a small b&w tv.
George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in Pedro Almodóvar’s TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! #FilmsInFilms pic.twitter.com/CjFjHSjaq0
— MUBI (@mubi) July 19, 2020
Then, Body Snatchers (1993, Abel Ferrara) on a poster within a film director’s editing office.
In truth, Don Pedro did of Time Me Up a sort-of noir, with the added twist of a film being shot within the film. There’s a lot of horror films and noirs within it. Sure enough Almodóvar got some inspiration from Peeping Tom (the guy who films everything about a woman, including the moment of her death) and The Collector (a guy who kidnaps a woman for his own desire–no coincidence, this under-plot is contained within Tie Me Up!).
IMDB quotes these connections:
