Rent Swept Away (1974)

As exciting now as when first released - Swept Away review by CW

So glad to be able to watch Lina Wurtmuller’s Swept Away again. Lead actors are absolutely marvellous. They worked with the director on several films. She studied with Fellini. Madonna and Guy Ritchy did a remake but the original is definitely the one to see. Shocking, brutal at times, sexual, romantic, sad. We laughed and gasped. Just wish that Lina Wurtmuller’s Seven Beauties was available in UK. Story takes place on a yacht and later on a gorgeous remote island with pale sand and the clearest water.

Sex and Sardines - Swept Away review by CH

What exactly is Swept Away (1974)? A precise answer cannot be given. That is hardly the point of this film, written and directed by Lina Wertmüller, which provides uneasy entertainment off the coast of a sunlit Italy.

Events begin aboard the deck of a private yacht engaged by the husband of Mariangelo Melato for a pleasurable voyage, their nautical and catering needs met by a crew from the South which includes Giancarlo Gianni whose staring eyes are set in a bearded face, all of which is redolent of a man at odds with settled order which finds him below decks and enraged at his culinary skills called into question by the pampered few.

A tense atmosphere becomes all the more so as she demands a journey upon a smaller vessel of which he takes charge. With a failure in its outboard motor and a switch in the current, they become adrift. A dead calm turns otherwise and they reach an uninhabited island where his resemblance to Robinson Crusoe becomes all the more marked. There is also something of Lawrence about all this – even of Castaway – as the relationship between man and woman, peasant and grandee, is played out amidst a struggle to survive, he taking the opportunity for revenge upon her previous denigration of him now that she needs his skills to seek out and then render that flesh into food.

To say more of the narrative would undermine the surprises it contains – and the questions one asks for some while after the credits have gone by. A brilliantly-shot film which plays in each viewer's mind as much it does upon the screen.