Swept Away is the second of the two films that my wife asked to add to our list by Italian director Lina Wertmüller. The first one was Seven Beauties which we watched about half a year ago. This one also stars Giancarlo Giannini, apparently he is one of this director’s favorite performers, and he is joined here by actress Mariangela Melato. These two seem to have had a very successful partnership under Wertmüller’s direction and their chemistry here is so strong that they have no problems carrying the film without the need for any other characters.

Raffaella (Melato) with her husband and their fellow rich friends are on a cruise in a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. Gennarino (Giannini) is one of the deckhands on the vessel. Throughout the trip, Raffaella talks non-stop about the worthlessness of peasants and mocks the political left. This infuriates Gennarino, a committed Communist, but he is forced to remain silent for the sake of his job. The tables are turned however when the two are shipwrecked on a deserted island and Gennarino is the only one who possesses the skills to survive. With the power now in his hands, he forces Rafffaella to submit to him and he isn’t shy about using physical force to assert his authority either.

With only two characters here, the narrative is obviously much simpler than that in Seven Beauties, though Raffaella’s tirades are so incessant that it’s easy for us non-Italian speakers to feel overwhelmed. I gather that it’s supposed to be humorous but my main takeaway is amazement at how much she can talk. But even as a non-Italian, I could appreciate that her prejudices against the left present an amusing view of Italian society. It’s great fun to watch her get her comeuppance when the full extent of how dire their straits are is revealed to them. Everyone enjoys mocking the super rich and the ultra-privileged. Wertmüller’s genius however is that Gennarino’s abuse goes so far that it turns him from the plucky underdog to the villain. It’s hard to keep the audience’s sympathy if your hero beats up women who so much as talk back to him.

I’m less comfortable with how the director edges into misogynistic territory with the development of the two characters. Some critics have argued that the director is attempting to depict class warfare in physical form, but I think that it’s also a portrayal of a dominating patriarchy is undeniable. The worse part of this is the insinuation that this more primal state of affairs is somehow more noble and more real, at least for a short while. This isn’t a terribly original statement to make and feels particularly facile today. There are other directions that Wertmüller could have taken the film that would have been more interesting to me, such as having Gennarino subsequent behavior confirming that Raffaella’s prejudices are in many ways based on reality.

Still, the direction that she did pick is a surprising twist and I have to say that with these two performers playing them, the passion of the two characters smolders with real heat. It’s certainly not any kind of romance that I’ve ever watched before and while I don’t like the messaging, I can’t deny that it is convincing, emotionally resonant and even funny in a very absurd way. For all of these reasons, watching Swept Away is an arresting experience. It’s overall a much simpler film than Seven Beauties, but that also probably makes it more approachable to most people.