It sounds like the setup of a rom-com: rich, beautiful Rafaella (Wertm\u00fcller 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 Wertm\u00fcller collaborator), who\u2019s a dedicated communist. Rafaella is intelligent but ignorant, a deadly combination, and when she isn\u2019t complaining about overdone pasta, she\u2019s spouting off with abrasive gusto about the failures of the political left. Wertm\u00fcller\u2019s camera has a sylphlike cunning in this early sequence, sneaking in and out of the boat\u2019s cramped quarters where servants and masters are forced into an uneasy intimacy. \u201cOne day, he\u2019ll kill us in our sleep,\u201d Rafaella quips to her husband after she catches Gennarino giving her a particularly seething look. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, the two end up stranded in a dingy. The social contract holds during this interlude, but just barely. Rafaella, who doesn\u2019t appear to have lifted a finger in her life unless it\u2019s 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\u2019s confirmed to be uninhabited, all hierarchical pretense falls away. \u201cHe\u2019s forgotten his place,\u201d Rafaella huffs. But she\u2019s hungry, and he knows how to catch a fish. Once Gennarino realizes he has the upper hand, he\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even at the time, the confounding nature of their \u201ccourtship\u201d divided critics. Both Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby of the New York Times<\/em> seemed to take the romance at face value in their positive reviews, with Ebert writing<\/a> that the film \u201cresists the director\u2019s most determined attempts to make it a fable.\u201d Feminists, understandably, were disturbed by Rafaella\u2019s seemingly masochistic capitulation to Gennarino\u2019s patriarchal fantasies and the pleasure she takes in being degraded, with Tania Modlewski stating that Wertm\u00fcller \u201cclouded rather than clarified the issues,\u201d even going so far as to suggest that she should\u2019ve made the characters two men. Wertm\u00fcller, for her part, has always demonstrated an aversion to convenient labels, saying<\/a> as recently as 2017 that she \u201cnever endorsed the feminist movement.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless, these diverging reads can undoubtedly be attributed to Wertm\u00fcller\u2019s confrontational style. The scenes where Gennarino physically assaults Rafaella are protracted to the point of cruelty, but Wertm\u00fcller films them from an ironic distance as they play out against the island\u2019s sprawling sands and beaches. There\u2019s also an undeniable erotic spark to their sexual encounters \u2013 tanned bodies writhing in the waves in a deliberate perversion of From Here to Eternity<\/em> \u2013 that complicates the violence they inflict on one another. \u201cPassion or nothing\u201d is one of Gennarino\u2019s demands of Rafaella, and that\u2019s not a bad description of Wertm\u00fcller\u2019s approach to the material. She was an outspoken leftist, but grafting political viewpoints onto the relationship doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s treatment of Rafaella seems less about making a larger point about injustice than petty, personal revenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also has more to lose when their Edenic paradise comes to an end. Sensing this and wanting to test her love, it\u2019s 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. \u201cI want nothing more to do with the female race,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Swept Away<\/em> (or as it’s more extravagantly known: Swept Away\u2026 By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August<\/em>) made Wertm\u00fcller 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<\/em>. 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<\/em>\u2019s combative energy makes the modern cinematic landscape seem awfully timid in comparison. Wertm\u00fcller understood better than most that people contain multitudes, often contradictory ones. It\u2019s why her work endures and why adventurous filmgoers will continue to wrestle with it for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Swept Away” is streaming on Kanopy<\/a>, Hoopla<\/a>, and Kino Film Collection<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/swept2.jpg\")
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