SWEPT AWAY… Movie Review

Swept Away…By an Unusual Destiny in
the Blue Sea of August

A rich, beautiful, arrogant Milanese woman (Mariangela Melato) is shipwrecked on a desert island with the masculine deckhand (Giancarlo Giannini) she used to treat like a slave. Lina Wertmüller's sexual fable takes on a not-so-subtle political dimension when material girl Melato becomes the eager, adoring sexual slave of the fiercely communist Giannini. She's dependent in other ways, too, since Giannini is the only one skilled enough to catch a fish and start a fire, but whatever lessons Melato learns melt away when their rescue portends a return to their traditional roles. The full title of the film was too long to fit on the marquee of the small Manhattan theatre—conveniently opposite Bloomingdale's—where Swept Away… opened, but the lines that stretched a full city block let the trendsetters know where it was playing. Swept Away… was the subject of lots of allegedly serious discussions about sexual roles, stereotypes, and politics, but more than anything else it became a high-toned make-out movie for upper east-siders and aspiring yuppies everywhere. It was the movie that started the blessedly brief American art house craze for the heavy-handed Wertmüller, which reached its frenzied height with the director's near-deification following the release of her Seven Beauties the following year.

NEXT STOP … Love and Anarchy, Sotto, Sotto, Tristana

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