Swept Away… Movie Review

If anyone had told me what this movie was about before I saw it, I wouldn't have made it past the popcorn stand. Gorgeous Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato are stuck together on a Mediterranean island; he treats her terribly, even beats her up—and she loves it, and him, and doesn't want to leave. In anyone else's hands but Lina Wertmuller's, it would have been unbearable for me to squirm through, much less sit through it. Yet Wertmuller's touch is deft and sure, savagely funny and deeply human, and the results are a sheer delight. Wertmuller's statements about sexual politics are well under her artistic control here, much as Pedro Almodovar's were at the time he made 1986's Matador.The acting by the two leads is wise and artful, and Julio Battiferri's cinematography is exquisite. AKA: Swept Away…By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August.

1975 (R) 116m/C IT Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato; D: Lina Wertmuller; W: Lina Wertmuller; C: Julio Battiferri; M: Piero Piccioni. VHS, Letterbox