Passion or Nothing: Swept Away at 50

In recent years, the attitudes of certain corners of “Film Twitter” have adopted a strain that can only be described as puritan. It’s not just that these viewers seem unusually averse to onscreen sex. There’s a stubborn resistance to engaging with difficult art beyond the surface level; good should be rewarded and bad should be punished. A film that doesn’t conform to the ever-shifting goalposts of political correctness is cancelled. The mind reels at what this generation might make of Lina Wertmüller, the Italian writer-director who had one of the greatest creative runs of the 1970s, and whose work is singularly designed to provoke. Her films are blunt, but that doesn’t mean they’re easily interpretable. Perhaps the one that remains hardest to pin down is 1974’s Swept Away, which fifty years on has lost none of its ability to piss off people across the spectrum. 

It sounds like the setup of a rom-com: rich, beautiful Rafaella (Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato) has chartered a yacht in the Mediterranean with her other rich, beautiful friends, but spends most of her time tormenting deckhand Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini, another frequent Wertmüller collaborator), who’s a dedicated communist. Rafaella is intelligent but ignorant, a deadly combination, and when she isn’t complaining about overdone pasta, she’s spouting off with abrasive gusto about the failures of the political left. Wertmüller’s camera has a sylphlike cunning in this early sequence, sneaking in and out of the boat’s cramped quarters where servants and masters are forced into an uneasy intimacy. “One day, he’ll kill us in our sleep,” Rafaella quips to her husband after she catches Gennarino giving her a particularly seething look. 

Instead, the two end up stranded in a dingy. The social contract holds during this interlude, but just barely. Rafaella, who doesn’t appear to have lifted a finger in her life unless it’s to hail a waiter, upbraids Gennarino for his inability to fix the water-logged motor. He mutters misogynist insults under his breath but allows her to sleep in his sweater. Eventually they reach a rocky island; as soon as it’s confirmed to be uninhabited, all hierarchical pretense falls away. “He’s forgotten his place,” Rafaella huffs. But she’s hungry, and he knows how to catch a fish. Once Gennarino realizes he has the upper hand, he’s loath to relinquish it, forcing Rafaella to enact a humiliating roleplay of escalating servitude. It starts with demanding she wash his underwear. It ends with her willingly submitting to him sexually. 

Even at the time, the confounding nature of their “courtship” divided critics. Both Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby of the New York Times seemed to take the romance at face value in their positive reviews, with Ebert writing that the film “resists the director’s most determined attempts to make it a fable.” Feminists, understandably, were disturbed by Rafaella’s seemingly masochistic capitulation to Gennarino’s patriarchal fantasies and the pleasure she takes in being degraded, with Tania Modlewski stating that Wertmüller “clouded rather than clarified the issues,” even going so far as to suggest that she should’ve made the characters two men. Wertmüller, for her part, has always demonstrated an aversion to convenient labels, saying as recently as 2017 that she “never endorsed the feminist movement.” 

Regardless, these diverging reads can undoubtedly be attributed to Wertmüller’s confrontational style. The scenes where Gennarino physically assaults Rafaella are protracted to the point of cruelty, but Wertmüller films them from an ironic distance as they play out against the island’s sprawling sands and beaches. There’s also an undeniable erotic spark to their sexual encounters – tanned bodies writhing in the waves in a deliberate perversion of From Here to Eternity – that complicates the violence they inflict on one another. “Passion or nothing” is one of Gennarino’s demands of Rafaella, and that’s not a bad description of Wertmüller’s approach to the material. She was an outspoken leftist, but grafting political viewpoints onto the relationship doesn’t make for a clean interpretation either. Oppressors teach the oppressed how to abuse power, but the reverse can also be true. The longer it goes on, Gennarino’s treatment of Rafaella seems less about making a larger point about injustice than petty, personal revenge.

He also has more to lose when their Edenic paradise comes to an end. Sensing this and wanting to test her love, it’s his doing that ultimately leads to their rescue. Once they are back on the mainland, inevitably their connection is corrupted by societal expectations. Rafaella returns to the gilded confines of her wealthy comforts. Gennarino must resign himself to the arms of his heretofore unmentioned wife. When he tries to convince Rafaella to run away to the island again, she rejects him and he retreats back to the security of bigotry. “I want nothing more to do with the female race,” he proclaims. But the film ends with him following after his enraged spouse. In a world where women need money to survive but men need women, it seems there is no hope of equality. 

Swept Away (or as it’s more extravagantly known: Swept Away… By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) made Wertmüller a controversial arthouse star in 1974. A year later, she became the first woman to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for Seven Beauties. But her proletariat sympathies seemed to fall out of fashion once Reaganism took hold, and she rarely received the same recognition and respect as contemporaries like Fellini or Visconti. Yet as we enter a new Gilded Age of haves and have-nots, Swept Away’s combative energy makes the modern cinematic landscape seem awfully timid in comparison. Wertmüller understood better than most that people contain multitudes, often contradictory ones. It’s why her work endures and why adventurous filmgoers will continue to wrestle with it for years to come.

“Swept Away” is streaming on Kanopy, Hoopla, and Kino Film Collection.

Sara Batkie is the author of the story collection 'Better Times,' which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Prize and is available from University of Nebraska Press. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University. Born in Bellevue, Washington and raised mostly in Iowa, Sara currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Back to top