Monthly Archives: August 2021

  • Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    ¡Átame!

    Pedro Almodóvar (1989)

    It’s an essential of romcom that the two characters made for each other must get through initial spats and conflicts before heading for their destiny.  In Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – a singular romantic comedy – there are unusually compelling reasons for the female protagonist to start off loathing the male one.  In the doorway of her Madrid apartment, Marina (Victoria Abril), actress, former porn star and recovering drug addict, is confronted by Ricky (Antonio Banderas), recently released from a mental institution and obsessed with her.  He forces his way into the apartment, tells Marina not to scream and, when she does, headbutts her into silence.  He then tapes her mouth, binds her wrists and ankles, and holds her hostage.  Ricky insists that, once she gets to know him, Marina will reciprocate his feelings for her.  He’s proved right.

    Before taking her prisoner in her own home, Ricky has been stalking Marina at the studios where shooting of her latest film is nearing completion:  ‘The Midnight Phantom’ is a horror movie in which a masked (to hide his mutilated face) and muscle-bound hulk is desperate to win the character played by Marina.  Ricky also tries to attract her – or, at least, her attention.  Wearing a long black wig he’s stolen from the studio props room, he plays air guitar and performs a handstand; Marina is unsurprisingly unimpressed.  He reminds her that, a year or so ago, after he’d absconded from the psychiatric hospital, they met and enjoyed one wonderful night together; she doesn’t remember it or him.  Marina is in pain even before Ricky’s violent arrival in her home.  She has toothache and her addiction to stronger stuff renders conventional painkillers ineffective.  Ricky agrees to take her, handcuffed to him, to a doctor.  After failing to get her prescription at a pharmacy (and tying up Marina once more), he acquires the drugs on the street, assaulting and stealing from a female dealer (Rossy de Palma).  The next time he goes out, the dealer spots Ricky and pursues him on her motorbike.  Her two male companions then beat him up.  On this occasion while Ricky’s absent, Marina manages partly to free herself.  When he returns, his sudden vulnerability is the turning point in their relationship.  She helps to bathe his wounds and they make love.  Instantly and ecstatically, the experience restores Marina’s memory of their previous encounter.

    More than thirty years on, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a dated film in one important respect:  it couldn’t be made now.  Not, at least, without the man who made it getting a very bad, potentially career-ending press.  Even if Almodóvar was cut a bit of slack by virtue of his gay rather than straight male gaze, it would be rope with which to hang himself.  The abusive nature of the set-up and of Ricky’s behaviour is compounded by the camera’s repeated scrutiny of the female star’s exposed body, including a sequence (before the kidnapping) of Marina pleasuring herself in the bath with a toy scuba diver.  The film sharply divided critical opinion even at the time of its original release, and was much more sympathetically received in Spain than elsewhere – as BFI’s handout for this screening, an excerpt from Paul Julian Smith’s biography of Almodóvar, published in 1994, made clear.

    Some of Almodóvar’s own statements about the film, as quoted by Smith, are questionable.  For example:

    ‘When you have nothing, like my main character, you have to force … everything, including love … the character played by Antonio Banderas, is a boy who has spent his life in public institutions.  Orphaned at age three, his whole life [sic] has been an unending trek through orphanages, borstals and mental homes.  When they let him out on the street, Ricki[1] has only (as the flamenco singers say) the night, the day, and the vitality of an animal.’

    And one other thing:  the dazzling charm of the actor playing him.  BFI’s website terms the film an ‘imaginative contemporary variation on the Beauty and the Beast story’.  Wikipedia’s article, echoing this, also places Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! in the tradition of tales, including King Kong and the Spanish Golden Age play Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca, in which ‘ the savagery of the Beast is, in the presence of Beauty, tamed by gentler feelings’.  Antonio Banderas’s ‘boy’ (he’s actually twenty-three) is physically very different, however, from these other leading men (and from the title character in ‘The Midnight Phantom’).  His exterior isn’t remotely bestial – this is more a ‘Beauty and the Beauty’ fable – and Ricky, right from the start, is presented as cheerfully, likeably amoral.

    There are echoes of The Collector in his single-minded determination to possess Marina but he’s only a distant relation of Freddie Clegg.  For a start, Ricky has no difficulty attracting women.  In the amusing opening sequences in the psychiatric hospital, he’s summoned to the office of the director (Lola Cardona).  She tells him, solemnly then tearfully, that he’s been judged fit to be discharged.  Her sorrow is immediately explained – Ricky has been her lover during his time as a patient.  His persisting obsession with Marina has had, at one level, a salutary outcome.  After their one-night-stand, as he later explains to his hostage, all his thoughts were about her – a  preoccupation that eliminated his delinquent behaviour.  This impressed the hospital authorities and brought about his release.  His conviction that Marina will return his love, which smacks of typical psycho delusion, turns out to be well-founded because Marina finds him irresistible:  Almodóvar, in effect, asks the question, how could she not, since he’s Antonio Banderas?  As a romantic hero, Ricky is strongly subversive, and the writer-director’s attitude towards him scarcely less so.  Almodóvar is disingenuous in suggesting that he came up with Ricky Banderas in a spirit of social conscience.

    The title of Paul Julian Smith’s biography is Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.  The name of the production company set up by Pedro and his brother Agustín in the mid-1980s is El Deseo (Desire).  The first picture they made under the El Deseo banner was Law of Desire.  The unarguable primacy of desire and its essential unscrupulousness, whatever the desirer may pretend, are recurring themes in Almodóvar’s work and just about ubiquitous in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!   People are sexually needy however much they may otherwise be in charge.  The comically bereft director of the mental institution is followed onto the screen by Máximo Espejo (Francisco Rabal), the aging director of ‘The Midnight Phantom’, who’s confined to a wheelchair following a stroke.  Espejo seems paternally protective of Marina as he bawls out a journalist for uttering the words ‘porn’ and ‘junkie’ in her presence.  It’s not long, though, before we watch Espejo privately and excitedly watching Marina’s porn movies; his dignified wife (Julieta Serrano) is regretfully resigned to her husband’s habit.  As so often, Almodóvar’s décor and costume choices are vivid and exhilarating; the members of his cast, whether or not conventionally good-looking, are all fascinating camera subjects.  The combination of these elements is visually and sensuously engaging – it’s an apt and a potent means of drawing the viewer into Almodóvar’s world of appetency. 

    There’s nothing in the Paul Julian Smith piece to suggest that Almodóvar also claimed to have intended an earnest exploration of Stockholm syndrome.  He, rather, makes Marina a subversive figure, too, through her ambivalence – often implied in Victoria Abril’s ingenious portrayal of her, and fully realised in the film’s climax.  Once they’ve become lovers, Marina agrees to leave Madrid with Ricky and head for the village in which he was born.  When he goes out to steal a car for the purpose, Marina tells him to tie her up again to ensure she doesn’t try to escape.  Her sister Lola (Loles León), who works as a production assistant to Máximo Espejo and has been trying to get to the bottom of Marina’s disappearance, arrives on the scene.  She’s shocked to find Marina bound and gagged – and to learn that she’s fallen in love with the man responsible.

    Loles León’s Lola has an appealing, game-for-anything pragmatism.  It makes sense that, when Ricky doesn’t return to the apartment, she agrees to drive Marina to the village where they assume he has headed.  They assume correctly:  Almodóvar needs Marina to find Ricky mooching sadly around the ruins of the house he was born in.  She runs to him and they embrace, as they would in the final moments of a standard-issue romcom.  This last-minute conventionalising is also reflected, to great comic effect, in Lola’s first remarks to Ricky.  She doesn’t condemn his unusual courtship strategy – as long as ‘You make sure it doesn’t happen again’, and there’s not a word about it to her and Marina’s mother.

    BFI is screening Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as part of their Ennio Morricone season but the score isn’t one of his best.  Morricone pastiches Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock pictures so obviously that the result is soon tediously roguish.  The gradually developing romantic theme is pleasant enough but unhelpfully redolent of Cinema Paradiso, which Morricone had scored the previous year.  His contributions are eclipsed by the film’s other musical elements:  Lola’s show-stopping bolero number (‘Canción del Alma’) at the wrap party for ‘The Midnight Phantom’’; and the concluding ‘Resistire’, a 1960s Spanish pop song, which plays on the car radio as Lola drives Marina and Ricky back to Madrid to start new life together.  While Lola and Ricky sing along, Marina just smiles quietly:  she’s no longer well placed to join in with a song whose title and main lyric assert resistance.  This finale is elating, thanks to the enthusiastic singing of Antonio Banderas and, for the second time in the film, Loles León.  Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is problematic but it’s even more enjoyable.  For the first time in the era of Covid-cinema-going, I kept being aware of grinning under my face mask.

    19 August 2021

    [1] I’ve spelt the name as ‘Ricky’, following the IMDb cast of characters.

  • The Wolf of Snow Hollow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jim Cummings (2020)

    ‘Comedy’ ‘Horror’ ‘Mystery’ is how IMDb defines Jim Cummings’s second feature, following Thunder Road (2018).  The layout of IMDb pages, with these various categories juxtaposed distinctly, can be inadvertently revealing of how a mash-up film works in practice, hopping between genres rather than fusing them.  That’s not the case with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, whose writer-director-lead actor brings off a remarkable balancing act.

    Serious crime in the (fictional) mountain town of Snow Hollow, Utah, happens once in a blue moon – until the night of a full moon, and the horrific murder of a young woman (Annie Hamilton), vacationing in the area with her boyfriend (Jimmy Tatro).  Shortly before the attack, the woman hears a growl in the darkness; there’s a bloody paw print in the snow beside her mutilated corpse.  The town sheriff, Hadley Marshall (Robert Forster), as well as being unused to investigating murder, is old and ill.  His state of health isn’t the only thing that Hadley’s insomniac son John (Jim Cummings) is losing sleep over.  John, too, is a police officer in the local force, as well as a member of a 12 Steps AA group, though he can hardly be termed a recovering alcoholic.  His ex-wife (Rachel Jane Day) is threatening to try to take their teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who lives with John, away from him.  Despite the turmoil in his life, he’s rational enough, along with his colleague Julia (Riki Lindholme), to be sure that his team’s on the hunt for a human rather than a lupine killer.  John is especially enraged by Chavez (Demetrius Daniels), a fellow officer who reckons the culprit is a werewolf.  Julia doesn’t expect any different.  As she calmly reminds John, Chavez ‘thinks Men in Black is a documentary’.

    The cinematographer Natalie Kingston does full justice to the awesome beauty of the Utah mountainscape.  Ben Lovett’s score is knowingly ominous but ominous nonetheless.  Both things bring to mind Twin Peaks – as do the various oddballs in the Snow Hollow sheriff’s office and diners.  Whether or not he’s consciously taken lessons from David Lynch in working comedy, horror and mystery into a coherent whole, this is what Jim Cummings achieves.  The nervous irritation of his characters, especially John, works up a head of steam that might seem to jeopardise the thriller element yet doesn’t:  you’re always keen to find out the solution to the crimes taking place at each full moon.  How quickly (in screen time) they become plural, functions as a satire of serial-killer dramas – again, without detracting from interest in the cockeyed police investigation.  We see the huge figure of the wolf-man, on hind legs, laying into his victims; we hear what he does to their bodies; but the film is pretty discreet in what it shows of the physical results of the mayhem.  (The smart editing is by Patrick Nelson Barnes and R Brett Thomas.)  Eschewing a gore-fest reflects, on Cummings’s part, an intelligent distance from the visceral traditions of horror that never curdles into smugness.  Taxidermy is an inevitably creepy art; its screen practitioners are traditionally dubious customers.  Paul Carnury (Will Madden) hardly subverts the tradition but Cummings handles this effectively.  His droll dialogue reinforces the Twin Peaks connection yet The Wolf of Snow Hollow‘s glancing dry humour feels increasingly its own.

    Like Jim Arnaud in Thunder Road, John is a cop with a failed marriage and a daughter whose custody is at issue.  The earlier film – with the strapline ‘Officer Arnaud loved his mother’ – opens with, and is chiefly memorable for, Jim’s eulogy at the mother’s funeral service.  In The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Jenna, who’s soon to start college and is exasperated by her father’s hyper-protectiveness, asks if he thinks he’s like he is because his mother left him when he was a kid.  Also like Jim, John struggles to control his anger and his short fuse at work is the harbinger of a full-scale breakdown.  A major difference from Thunder Road is the presence of the protagonist’s father but Hadley, since he’s both his boss and at death’s door, ties John in further emotional knots:  when Hadley finally succumbs to heart disease, it sends his son over the edge.  As John’s personal problems increasingly dominate the story, the echoes from Thunder Road are loud enough to distract the attention of viewers familiar with Cummings’s previous feature.  It’s fortunate that both the protagonist and the film he’s in stage a rally for the climax to proceedings, when the killer-wolf’s identity is revealed.  John’s rehabilitation may not be complete; since that’s convincing in itself, it strengthens the film’s recovery.

    Cummings’s performance is a big step up from his work in front of the camera in his last film.   He confirms, notably in the alcoholics group sequences, the talent for sardonic throwaway that he showed in Thunder Road; he also achieves a new emotional authenticity, particularly in John’s exchanges with his daughter, well played by Chloe East, and his father.   According to Wikipedia, Matt Miller, one of the producers, ‘had known Robert Forster from a previous project, and sent the script to his agent.  … Jim Cummings said they “expected a polite ‘no'” but Forster chose to take the role because he viewed it as “a dramatic movie about a father-son relationship, and complications of aging and health”’.  Thanks to his presence and the good writing, Forster realises what he saw in the material – with ease and wit, even though his own health was declining when shooting took place in early 2019.  He died a few months later, a full year before the film’s North American release in October 2020.  Cummings, who knows to give centre stage to Robert Forster in their scenes together, dedicates The Wolf of Snow Hollow to this fine character actor.

    Riki Lindholme also shines as Julia – blending sanity and eccentricity, making her character increasingly admirable.  You want to cheer when Julia eventually inherits Hadley’s star.  She’s quietly but definitely aware that women aren’t really seen as up to the job:  a sheriff’s cap, she observes, isn’t designed for a head with a ponytail.  Cummings has a nice line in woke insights that are deadpan but trenchant.  John, after some background reading on lycanthropy, asks Julia, ‘You think women have had to deal with this shit since the Middle Ages?’  She doesn’t say anything in response, preferring an eloquent straight look.  When Jenna eventually leaves for college, the still-anxious John gives her condoms and a gun.  As she settles into her dorm room, her father takes his leave.  On the way out, he hears a couple of male students describing the girls in the new intake as ‘fresh meat’.  Those are the last words in the script.  John pauses for a moment before walking away.

    After watching Thunder Road, I said I was keen to see more from Jim Cummings.  I’d not made much effort to do so – I didn’t even know he’d made this second feature before noticing that a third, The Beta Test (co-written and co-directed with P J McCabe), was showing at this month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.  I booked to see The Beta Test online only to be told a couple of days beforehand that it wouldn’t, after all, be available remotely.  It was screened in Edinburgh for a couple of days, though, and, according to a review on the Filmhounds website, will be coming to British cinemas (via Blue Finch Releasing) in October this year.  The Wolf of Snow Hollow has made me all the keener to follow Cummings’s progress.  I’ll try to make a better job of it this time around.

    17 August 2021

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