If ever the well-worn idea of Stockholm syndrome were to have a Spanish equivalent, complete with the passionate flair of the urban landscape and the compact but spacious flats and apartments, it would have to be that of this mid-career movie directed by Pedro Almodóvar with his frank drollery, darkness, and humor. Átame is a blast, featuring an Antonio Banderas early in his career as a madman envisioning a life for his unsuspecting hostage. Arriving at its own pleasant tipping point and a gently ironic ending, the story gives a taste of the director’s sense of absurdity, at times savage and brutal, biting and disturbing. But let’s not go there yet.
Victoria Abril plays former drug addict and adult-film actress Marina Osorio, performing in the big time with a lecherous, wheelchair-bound director till she becomes the captive of Ricky, played by Antonio Banderas, recently released from a madhouse where he was having an affair with its female director. And what can we do with Banderas’ character? His is the wildest and most unhinged of the lot—even though the rest don’t represent perfect sanity—and some of his scenes in Átame are unforgettable, especially the one where he struts in front of the mirror in Marina Osorio’s dressing room with his ludicrous and capacious wig fluffed out like that of some unhinged, dangerous rock star. And then he goes on to his committed infamy.
But the insanity of his character doesn’t keep Banderas from playing it with depth, entertaining the possibility that this façade of sanity could be, in a different light, that of a bold and desperate intelligence boiling beneath its own pressures. Also convincing is the conversion of the saucy and careless Marina into a supple and sympathetic lover of her madman. And the wheelchair-bound director is a hoot.
And so comes the issue of the purpose of Átame—droll, ironic, buoyed by its ridicule of the nature of romantic love and by a lightness of touch in apparent contrast with its intensity. It’s a befuddling slew of events that would leave the viewer uneasy and perplexed as to what to think, how to evaluate, if it weren’t at once so joyous and so funny. Love is mad, perhaps? Or maybe just madness is mad, and we don’t really need to ponder these things. Just let them be while the lovers and former strangers, the captive and her captor, drive off into the sunset and over the moon.
