Michael_Elliott Swept Away (1974) **** (out of 4) Rich woman Raffaella Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato) and her servant Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini) end up being taken away from their boat as the current sweeps them away and onto a deserted island. Now that the tables are turned and her money isn't going to save her, Gennarino plans to teach the woman a lesson about life. Lina Wertmuller's SWEPT AWAY has been called a masterpiece by many, a evil picture by some and there are certainly some that fall somewhere in between. I think the reason there are so many mixed reviews of this film is that it's so hard to fully put your hands on it. I mean, a hundred different people could attend a screening of this film and then afterwards each of them would see something different. Is it a drama? It is a political message about living conditions between the rich and poor? Is it some sort of dark comedy where the poor man gets his day in the sun? SWEPT AWAY is a film I really loved watches even if parts of it certainly rubbed me the wrong way. The opening twenty-minutes or so clearly set up that this rich woman is rather heartless, cruel and uncaring about anyone other than herself. When she gets lost at sea you're happy to see her get a dose of reality but at the same time I can't say I enjoyed how she got it. There were times where the man physically abuses her and I must admit that this didn't make me care for him any or cheer for him to "teach" the rich woman. Yet, the film takes these ugly moments and does stuff with them that most films wouldn't dare try, nevermind actually making them work. Another rather remarkable thing is how much you can believe what you're seeing. I'm not going to ruin what actually happens but director Wertmuller really makes you believe it from start to finish and talk about the perfect ending. The film contains some very harsh language and some ugly violence but in its own pay these scenes are rather poetic. Another major plus is that both Melato and Giannini turn in two of the greatest performances you're going to see. Both of them were simply terrific in their roles and even when the tables are turned, both of them are believable and really sell the fire and passion of the story. SWEPT AWAY is a very unique film that's quite unlike any other including the countless imitations that have been released. The film manages to work on so many levels and it's greatness is also what many might see as ugliness.

Lee Eisenberg One of Lina Wertmuller's frequent themes is how Northern Italy often looks down on Southern Italy. Nowhere does she explore this better than in "Swept Away". While on a tour in the Mediterranean, spoiled, pro-Fascist Northern Italian Raffaela Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato) orders Sicilian deckhand Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini) to take her to the grotto so she can go swimming before dinner. Lo and behold, the boat conks out and they end up an uncharted island (no, this isn't "Gilligan's Island" here). Raffaela treats Gennarino like dirt at first, but after he explodes at her, she grows to respect him.Like I said, this was Lina Wertmuller's best treatment of Northern-Southern Italian relations.

David Downing SWEPT AWAY is a genuinely artistic, intelligent, and thought-provoking film that uses a simple story to deal with many complicated issues. However, it's also a product of the school of thought that advocates (1) frustrating audience expectations in the name of artistic evolution, and (2) being as downbeat as possible in the name of realism. The result is a film that I can appreciate at an intellectual level, but can't genuinely enjoy at some deeper gut level.The story is a variation on a theme that's probably as old as literature itself -- the role reversal that results from a master and servant being "swept away" from a world governed by the master's rules and into a world governed only by the law of survival. The master in this case is Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato), a high-society lady to whom reheated coffee and undercooked spaghetti are major crises. (In fact, the spaghetti was NOT undercooked; Raffaella had never heard of al dente.) Ms. Lanzetti is also offended by the hired help's sweaty T-shirts, apparently unaware that if you perform manual labor in the hot summer sun and the hotter galley of your husband's yacht, a significant amount of sweat is inevitable. The servant is Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini), one of the workers on the yacht, who suffers the largest share of Raffaella 's complaining and derision. In the first part of the film, Gennarino spends much time muttering about how he'd like to get his hand on Raffaella for five minutes.Gennarino gets to act on his stored-up anger when he and Raffaella get stranded on a deserted island. And herein lies the first example of the film deliberately frustrating the audience. A traditional drama would let us see one character as the hero and the other as the villain. Or, possibly, we'd be asked to see both of them as heroes, villains, or mixed bags. In any case, we'd be able to decide who we were going to sympathize with throughout the story. But SWEPT AWAY continually turns the tables on you. Until they get to the island, your heart is going out to Gennarino, and you would dearly love to dump a plate of that al dente spaghetti on Raffaella 's head. (BTW, you actually get to see something like that happen in the Madonna remake.) But when the worm turns, the "lesson" Gennarino gives Raffaella is so cruel, brutal, and sadistic that it seems way out of proportion to the offense she committed against him -- especially since it goes on so relentlessly for so long. Furthermore, we realize that Raffaella 's attitude toward Gennarino wasn't so much due to malice as ignorance. Her high-society world is all she knows. And we wonder if Gennarino should perhaps have taken that into account. We also wonder if Gennarino really is the vile creature that Raffaella has accused him of being.But we're forced to switch sympathies yet again -- back to Gennarino -- when they get off the island. By this time, they've fallen in love -- or so they believe -- which begs the question of what's going to happen to their relationship when they get back to Raffaella 's high-society world.I can't tell you what happens, but I will tell you that the message we're left with is not the one I suspect we were supposed to expect. I'm guessing we're supposed to hope for an upbeat statement about how these two different classes of people can learn from each other. Instead SWEPT AWAY seems to be saying that's a bunch of hogwash, contrary to what you and the two main characters might have wanted to believe.Of course that could just be the truth, and the upbeat message I spoke of could be trite and corny, which SWEPT AWAY definitely isn't. The power struggle and love/hate relationship between Raffaella and Gennarino serves as a vehicle to explore a lot of complicated issues about class struggles and conflicting values, and maybe where we end up is where the filmmaker honestly believes all this exploring is supposed to take you.But the end result -- for me, at least -- is that SWEPT AWAY might be a great material for a master's thesis, but not for a fun evening.

zetes A film that's exceedingly difficult to pin down. It would be easy to dismiss it, but it's just as easy to be startled and amazed by it. The story's simple enough: a shaggy, dark-skinned man (played by Giancarlo Gianni) works under the thumb of the bourgoisie on a hired yacht. He despises them, and they despise him. One of these rich people is particularly annoying, a blonde woman (Mariangelo Melato), who spends her days incessantly bitching, spouting capitalist slogans, and putting down the servant class. These two characters, not surprisingly, end up together on a dinghy whose motor has broken. She never shuts up, he stares at her murderously. They eventually land on a deserted island, where he refuses to help her whatsoever. She eventually has to submit to whatever abuses he chooses to dish out. Yes, that does include physical and eventually a near-rape, which will certainly disgust and upset a lot of the film's audience. The film can actually be sort of perverse. I'm sure many have marvelled that, with some of the film's crueller scenes, the film was directed by a woman. It is actually, in its way, nearly as perverse at some times as The Night Porter, directed in the very same year in Italy, also by a woman. That film's merits are more dubious than Swept Away's, however. The film is unexpectedly hilarious, at least for the first forty-five minutes or so. When the abuse starts, the film begins to shift to a social issues picture. Class issues are important, as well as racial issues (which kind of amount to the same thing). I didn't mind seeing the woman verbally abused - she spent the first forty-five minutes doing the same to the guy. The smackings she receives were hard for even me to take, however. The politics are nevertheless exceedingly interesting. The film has some very good material on the social constructions of class. After this section of the film, the story shifts to erotica, and it is very erotic at times. In this section, the film is a direct descendent of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (as was The Night Porter, incidentally). After that, the film shifts once again to romantic melodrama, as the two are rescued. The man makes the decision to signal a yacht that he sees in the distance simply because he wants to test the deep love that the woman swears by. These shifts in narrative can be clearly felt, like upshifting in a manual transmission vehicle, but it works rather well. I was always right with the film with its emotions (although it took me a good twenty minutes to get into the film). I ended up rather loving it, despite its flaws. Now I actually want to see the Madonna version to see how bad that hack Guy Ritchie screwed it up. At one point in the film the man tells the woman that she looks like the Madonna. Pretty funny, no? 9/10.