Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (, , "Tie Me!") is a 1989 Spanish dark romantic comedy film co-written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Victoria Abril and Antonio Banderas alongside Loles Léon, Francisco Rabal, Julieta Serrano, María Barranco, and Rossy de Palma. The plot follows a recently released psychiatric patient who kidnaps an actress in order to make her fall in love with him. He believes his destiny is to marry her and father her children. The film was highly successful with both critics and audiences in Spain. Its United States release was entangled in controversy, instrumental in the implementation by the MPAA of a new rating category, NC-17, for films of an explicit nature that were previously unfairly regarded as pornographic because of the X rating. Plot Ricky, a 23-year-old psychiatric patient, has been deemed cured and is released from a mental institution. Until then, he has been the lover of the woman director of the hospital. An orphan, free, and alone, his goal is to have a normal life with Marina Osorio, an actress, former porn star, and recovering drug addict, whom he once slept with during an escape from the asylum. Ricky discovers Marina's whereabouts from a film journal announcement of the start of her next film. He goes to the studio, where Marina is in her last day at work filming The Midnight Phantom, a Euro-horror film about a hideously mutilated, masked muscleman in love with Marina's character. The film is directed by Máximo Espejo, an old film director confined to a wheelchair after a stroke. Máximo is a gentle mentor to Marina, and threatens to throw out a journalist who mentions the words "porn" and "junkie" in Marina's presence. His protection of the actress is not completely innocent, since he is sexually attracted to Marina, enjoying what could be his last experience of directing a sexy female lead.