Swept Away (1974)

Film: Swept Away...by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974)
Stars: Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato
Director: Lina Wertmuller
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Later this month, Lina Wertmuller will become only the second female director to win an Honorary Academy Award (the first was Agnes Varda in 2017).  Wertmuller already had a distinctive chapter in Oscar history when she became the first female director ever cited for Best Director for 1976's Seven Beauties.  In honor of her accolade this month, I thought it appropriate we mark the occasion somehow, but while I have not seen Seven Beauties (obviously for the Oscar Viewing Project we'll get there eventually), I have always been more intrigued by a different, more controversial installment in Wertmuller's filmography: Swept Away (the full title is longer, as I listed above, but for the sake of my typing fingers, we'll refer to it as Swept Away throughout this article).  Made in 1974, the movie garnered heated discussion when it was released in the mid-70's, being lauded by critics such as Roger Ebert & Vincent Canby, while other people like noted feminist Ellen Willis disparaged the film as anti-woman and sexist.  Considering the hullaballoo around such a film (and the fact that it was remade with disastrous consequences by Guy Ritchie and Madonna some thirty years after), I figured what better way to investigate the career of Lina Wertmuller than to go to a movie that attracted such attention?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is the sort of movie that reads as pretty simple when you just examine the plot, so we'll start here to ground you in the film, but move on from the plot pretty quickly.  Essentially we have Raffaella (Melato), a trophy wife on a cruise in the Mediterranean where she frequently disparages the staff, particularly Gennarino (Giannini), a waiter with anger issues.  One day, while she's trying to meet her husband on an island, they become shipwrecked, and find themselves on a deserted island.  Here the tables are turned, with Gennarino forcing Raffaella to worship at his feet so that he'll provide food for her.  They fall in love, and Raffaella wants to continue to stay on the island with him forever, but Gennarino wants her to prove that she loves him by going back to civilization, having her choose him and his command rather than doing so because of chance (the shipwreck).  Once ashore, though, they revert back to their lives, having been changed by the experience but her not able to give up a life of privilege, and him defeated, going back to his loveless marriage.

The film's controversy is warranted.  Raffaella is not meant to be a character you like-in fact, the way that she spouts offensive political thoughts in the first half of the film and treats everyone like garbage, you definitely want her to get some sort of comeuppance in the back half of the film.  Wertmuller, though, plays with you clearly hating Raffaella by having her utterly humiliated to the point where it's difficult to watch in the film's center, when Gennarino treats her like garbage until she finally is subservient to him.  There are scenes in Swept Away that would be impossible to show today, considering the way that Raffaella is treated, and while the film doesn't quite go into the lens of rape-fantasy film, it toes that line close enough that I get what writers like Willis were objecting to when they wrote about the film in the 70's.

That being said-Swept Away is almost unreal in how confident and put-together it is.  There's a reason that Wertmuller was able to break down so many glass ceilings in her career-she's just that good.  The film's framing is perfect, the way that it doesn't shy away from conversations about sex, gender, and money, even if it makes the audience uncomfortable.  Those final moments, where you understand that Gennarino, who has been built up through Raffaella in the audience's mind as a "big man" in fact proves that he's a vain, lost soul who gave up his god complex because he couldn't understand his own limitations...it's provocative and shocking, but it's also like nothing I've ever seen from a film before.  The movie is, in fact, both problematic and a masterpiece, brilliantly pulled together & edited & acted while also giving the audience more questions than answers at the end.  Raffaella leaves clearly changed, but we don't understand if she pines for her time with Gennarino, or feels epic relief for it being over, getting to return to her regular life.  Gennarino leaves a paltry man, defeated in his gambit, knowing what it is like to live his twisted, warped fantasy and now left to have it as a memory, likely eventually realizing it was just a mirage.  It's, to use a more modern parlance, "messed up," but it's also challenging and smart, the sort of film you can think about for weeks afterwards.  As a result, I side with both Willis and Ebert here-Wertmuller made a film whose politics are frequently gross, but are so chilling & thought-provoking it's impossible to dismiss.