Italy drama
1974
color 114 min.
Director: Lina Wertmuller
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1465L
Swept Away . . . (1974) cheerfully illustrates that a female director is not necessarily a feminist filmmaker. Lina Wertmüller is responsible for some of the most derogatory images of women in 1970s cinema, from The Seduction of Mimi (as in the cheap humor of a woman's gargantuan buttocks through a wide-angle lens) to Seven Beauties (whose female characters range from whores to an elephantine Nazi commandant). Then again, Wertmüller is above all a satirist, a former puppeteer whose movies are a deft balancing act between parody and affection for characters‹male as well as female.
Comic reversal permeates Swept Away . . . It begins on a boat where the surly servant Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) detests the imperious boss Raffaella (Mariangela Melato). When she insists that he take her out for a swim on a little boat, they become lost. Stranded on an island, they enact a shift of power roles: If on the yacht‹where property reigns‹the owners make the rules, in a natural setting, power is a function of brute strength.
In both cases, however, domination is less "natural" than predicated on social indoctrination. On the boat, Raffaella is in control because she pays Gennarino, who needs the money; on the island, Gennarino is in charge because he controls what she needs (food and shelter) while she is helpless.
But Swept Away . . . is as much a love story as an exercise in sexual politics. Wertmüller seems to celebrate Raffaella's released sensuality on the island‹how she becomes "a real woman." In a long tradition whose literary antecedents include Lady Chatterley's Lover, a lower-class "natural man" releases the eroticism of a repressed female who falls in love with him while being liberated from a socially defined identity.
There is, of course, tremendous irony in Wertmüller's treatment of the lovers. As she revealed, "Giancarlo always plays Sicilians in my films, which for me is a symbol of the South of all the world, the subproletarians, the women, the people below." In other words, Gennarino represents women, and Raffaella represents men!
Wertmüller was Fellini's assistant on 8 1/2, and inherited his love of buffoons, grotesques, and distorted creatures. Her women are no more "real" than Fellini's female giants, her men no more "real" than Fellini's clowns. And the situation of Swept Away . . . is no more credible than the makeup on Raffaella's face, which remains intact despite days on the beach.
Ultimately, the film resists feminist analysis because exaggeration is Wertmüller's favorite instrument. A memorable example is Gennarino slapping Raffaella for taxes and inflation, as a symbol of the rich and powerful. The director alternates close-ups‹to make us love both characters‹with long shots that make them ludicrous, rendering Swept Away . . . a provocative farce.
-- Annette Insdorf
Annette Insdorf, Professor of Film at Columbia University, is the author of François Truffaut and Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.
