Swept Away (1974)

Truly Dreadful Film

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Overrated

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Raffaella, who is a rich woman, her husband, and their rich friends rent a yacht and go sailing in the Mediterranean. She and her husband carry on screaming arguments about political ideology, with Raffaella expressing her fascist views with much vehemence. We all expect Italians in movies to be passionate, but we have never seen anything like this. Gennarino is a deckhand and a communist, whom she treats like dirt.When Raffaella and Gennarino get stranded on a deserted island, he decides to reverse roles with a vengeance. He beats her into submission, forcing her to call him Signor Carunchio, while calling her Raffaella (when not calling her a bitch or an industrial whore), instead of Signora Lanzetti, as he did on board the yacht. Then, when all this verbal and physical abuse has finally made her want him to ravish her brutally, he says that is not enough. She must tell him she loves him, kiss his feet, and worship him like a god. She actually does kiss his feet and submit to him totally, falling madly in love with him. But he still beats her whenever she misbehaves, as when she presumes to think instead of doing what she is told.This may be a minor point, but it is odd that Gennarino, the communist, believes that women should be totally subservient to men, which we would be more likely to associate with fascism.Anyway, the day finally arrives when a boat comes within sight of the island. Raffaella does not want to signal them because she fears being rescued might spoil their happiness. But Gennarino believes that only if they are rescued can he be sure that she truly loves him. Once rescued, Raffaella might have been able to thwart public opinion and marry Gennarino, but when she sees him being greeted by his wife, who talks about their children, she has misgivings. But given Gennarino's attitude toward women, why should he care about what happens to his wife? He wants Raffaella to go back and live on the island with him, but she decides against it. He reverts to calling her a bitch and an industrial whore.Because this is a comedy, we hesitate to take it too seriously, but there simply is not enough humor in this movie to overcome the revulsion we feel at the way he treats her, especially since the movie seems to prove he is right in believing that a man can make a woman love him by degrading her and beating her.

Swept Away (1974) **** (out of 4) Rich woman Raffaella Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato) and her servant Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini) end up being taken away from their boat as the current sweeps them away and onto a deserted island. Now that the tables are turned and her money isn't going to save her, Gennarino plans to teach the woman a lesson about life. Lina Wertmuller's SWEPT AWAY has been called a masterpiece by many, a evil picture by some and there are certainly some that fall somewhere in between. I think the reason there are so many mixed reviews of this film is that it's so hard to fully put your hands on it. I mean, a hundred different people could attend a screening of this film and then afterwards each of them would see something different. Is it a drama? It is a political message about living conditions between the rich and poor? Is it some sort of dark comedy where the poor man gets his day in the sun? SWEPT AWAY is a film I really loved watches even if parts of it certainly rubbed me the wrong way. The opening twenty-minutes or so clearly set up that this rich woman is rather heartless, cruel and uncaring about anyone other than herself. When she gets lost at sea you're happy to see her get a dose of reality but at the same time I can't say I enjoyed how she got it. There were times where the man physically abuses her and I must admit that this didn't make me care for him any or cheer for him to "teach" the rich woman. Yet, the film takes these ugly moments and does stuff with them that most films wouldn't dare try, nevermind actually making them work. Another rather remarkable thing is how much you can believe what you're seeing. I'm not going to ruin what actually happens but director Wertmuller really makes you believe it from start to finish and talk about the perfect ending. The film contains some very harsh language and some ugly violence but in its own pay these scenes are rather poetic. Another major plus is that both Melato and Giannini turn in two of the greatest performances you're going to see. Both of them were simply terrific in their roles and even when the tables are turned, both of them are believable and really sell the fire and passion of the story. SWEPT AWAY is a very unique film that's quite unlike any other including the countless imitations that have been released. The film manages to work on so many levels and it's greatness is also what many might see as ugliness.

The entire premise of the accidentally positioned relationship of the sailor with the rich and spoiled woman is entirely contrived and like a very well oiled opera, it spins in surprising circles, taking us to places we did not anticipate when we first meet the characters.Where it could have fallen into a parody or in its simplest form, a Marxist diatribe, the director raises the form into metaphor and both shocks and surprises us along the way. I can imagine that when this film first came out in 1974, the public must have gasped at several things: there are several moments in the film when the sailor just explodes in a rageful outpouring of physical abuse to the lovely lady. In short, he beats her about the face and wrestles with her until she is quite roughed up. The repeated slapping is still hard to watch, even if you think in your mind that these are well trained actors. The overt machismo that the sailor humiliates the lady with is both laughable and grotesque by our standards. Sure the film is making fun of Italian men and especially at the expense of the so-called coarser Southern Italian men and even more the Sicilian men....but it is so overdone that it too rises to metaphor. He struts about like a liberated tyrant, cave-man, looking for every opportunity to enjoy sweet revenge over his hapless companion. What does he achieve? He certainly does break her down and destroys every vestige of her snobby, boorish, disrespectful, artificial outer self and when pealed away what emerges is her long suppressed tender and humbled self. Listen: some people, usually men, go and seek some lunatic guru up in the mountains to help them attain this type of simplicity and humility, so the idea in itself is not far fetched. The difference is that this lady did not choose her fate on the island, did not go seeking humility; it was the only way to survive and in a way here lies an important aspect of Wertmuller's film. Is she asking us: what control do we have when forces much greater than us (poverty in particular as exemplified by the sailor and his laments) push us to limits of endurance? What type of people do we become? Wertmuller is also asking us: the rich have so many more choices, including cultivating their own sense of place and humility in the world and that they do not cannot be attributed to the same stresses that tear apart the poor. I'm simplifying but this seems to be one of the underlying themes.Other themes: the sailor takes advantage of a situation that presents itself in his life for the first time. Sure he's been working hard all his life and he's still the lackey cleaning up the crap of the rich. And, he's totally unappreciated by his family. Now, he can work just as hard but call ALL of the shots including sexual domination and physical appreciation. He certainly did not set out to win over the lovely lady but after seeing how dependent she was and how unaware of her own self sufficiency, he saw an opportunity to dominate and over a woman! The temptation was too great to let alone. She is everything he has fantasized about (without admitting it) and he taunts her with the very same thoughts.And then let's look at passion and love. Where the chemical attraction ends (and by the last third of the film there is plenty of that) there appears to be true and passionate love. At this point I started to feel completely caught up in their torrid affair and the tenderness the sailor finally gives to her just melts your heart. Underneath all that caveman behavior is a very soft hearted and loving man, who never had an outlet for his feelings. Sure he acts like a child, demanding love only on his terms, but that's not the point. They are both childish in their own ways. What the film leaves in your mind...how is it that such diametrically opposed and different people can scratch and crawl their way into passionate and REAL love? And while the film leaves you believing in the truth of their passions, it evaporates at the end, leaving me, at least, very upset at the outcome. Of course Wurtmuller could have opted for the happy ending and then what? In a sense it would have become just too ridiculous, becoming a lampoon of what was uncovered between them. In life, these types of illicit affairs are very often ephemeral and while short lived, very hot. And then they disappear into thin air. Do we seek the romantic ending we wished the film to have taken or do we accept the bitterness of the sailor, cursing much more than the rich lady: his fate yet again returning as bitter as ever; he returning to be a smelly lout of a husband, dragging behind his wife as she barely endures his presence.Giannini gives a towering performance which although teeters on comic self parody, he inhabits his role and lets his inner self evolve as the moment changes. Never over acting even when in a full rage, showing gentleness and hot passion in perfect balance, he is awesome as the rough edged sailor, going nowhere in life. Mariangela Melato is simply gorgeous and sexy and has the time of her life with this role. The two of them took risks as actors but the sparks all seemed so real. You just don't see movies made like this today because we live in politically correct times. Films like this and Linsday Anderson's "IF" would either shock us or else would have been ignored as too artsy. I loved this film and the way it moved my heart.

SWEPT AWAY is a genuinely artistic, intelligent, and thought-provoking film that uses a simple story to deal with many complicated issues. However, it's also a product of the school of thought that advocates (1) frustrating audience expectations in the name of artistic evolution, and (2) being as downbeat as possible in the name of realism. The result is a film that I can appreciate at an intellectual level, but can't genuinely enjoy at some deeper gut level.The story is a variation on a theme that's probably as old as literature itself -- the role reversal that results from a master and servant being "swept away" from a world governed by the master's rules and into a world governed only by the law of survival. The master in this case is Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato), a high-society lady to whom reheated coffee and undercooked spaghetti are major crises. (In fact, the spaghetti was NOT undercooked; Raffaella had never heard of al dente.) Ms. Lanzetti is also offended by the hired help's sweaty T-shirts, apparently unaware that if you perform manual labor in the hot summer sun and the hotter galley of your husband's yacht, a significant amount of sweat is inevitable. The servant is Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini), one of the workers on the yacht, who suffers the largest share of Raffaella 's complaining and derision. In the first part of the film, Gennarino spends much time muttering about how he'd like to get his hand on Raffaella for five minutes.Gennarino gets to act on his stored-up anger when he and Raffaella get stranded on a deserted island. And herein lies the first example of the film deliberately frustrating the audience. A traditional drama would let us see one character as the hero and the other as the villain. Or, possibly, we'd be asked to see both of them as heroes, villains, or mixed bags. In any case, we'd be able to decide who we were going to sympathize with throughout the story. But SWEPT AWAY continually turns the tables on you. Until they get to the island, your heart is going out to Gennarino, and you would dearly love to dump a plate of that al dente spaghetti on Raffaella 's head. (BTW, you actually get to see something like that happen in the Madonna remake.) But when the worm turns, the "lesson" Gennarino gives Raffaella is so cruel, brutal, and sadistic that it seems way out of proportion to the offense she committed against him -- especially since it goes on so relentlessly for so long. Furthermore, we realize that Raffaella 's attitude toward Gennarino wasn't so much due to malice as ignorance. Her high-society world is all she knows. And we wonder if Gennarino should perhaps have taken that into account. We also wonder if Gennarino really is the vile creature that Raffaella has accused him of being.But we're forced to switch sympathies yet again -- back to Gennarino -- when they get off the island. By this time, they've fallen in love -- or so they believe -- which begs the question of what's going to happen to their relationship when they get back to Raffaella 's high-society world.I can't tell you what happens, but I will tell you that the message we're left with is not the one I suspect we were supposed to expect. I'm guessing we're supposed to hope for an upbeat statement about how these two different classes of people can learn from each other. Instead SWEPT AWAY seems to be saying that's a bunch of hogwash, contrary to what you and the two main characters might have wanted to believe.Of course that could just be the truth, and the upbeat message I spoke of could be trite and corny, which SWEPT AWAY definitely isn't. The power struggle and love/hate relationship between Raffaella and Gennarino serves as a vehicle to explore a lot of complicated issues about class struggles and conflicting values, and maybe where we end up is where the filmmaker honestly believes all this exploring is supposed to take you.But the end result -- for me, at least -- is that SWEPT AWAY might be a great material for a master's thesis, but not for a fun evening.