Word: raffaella
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...first glance, Swept Away seems to bear a sexist message. Its protagonists are conventional sexual stereotypes. Raffaella (played by Mariangela Melata) is a rich capitalist bitch vacationing on a chartered yacht, most in her element when berating the deckhand who brings her iced coffee for the offensive odor of his sweaty shirt; Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) is the long-suffering deckhand, devoted equally to the Communist Party and to machismo. The plot is equally classic: shipwrecked together on a beautiful mediterranean isle, the two characters reverse roles entirely. Proletarian Gennarino humiliates bourgeois Rafaella sadistically, avenging class oppression and affronts...
...parody the pervasively destructive effects of the link between sexual and social roles in Italian life. Even on a desert island the lovers must reproduce the warped roles of their society; the only type of relationship they can have is master to slave, since Gennarino's anger and Raffaella's masochism are so deeply rooted in their characters. If this were truly the thrust of the film, Swept Away would be a compelling feminist film effectively connecting sex and politics...
...such a sympathetic reading runs aground on the love story which comprises the second half of the film. Once Raffaella accepts subjugation, in a cathartic scene where she kisses Gennarino's feet after he has symbolically thrust a stake through a skinned rabbit, the comedy is dissipated. Using the graceful closeups which distinguish her style, Wertmuller evokes the intensity and eroticism of a great love affair so subtly and effectively as to make Last Tango in Paris seem like a mouthwash commercial. The subjective gaze of the camera and the expressive interaction of the actors combine to compel the audience...
...sexual behavior: in Love and Anarchy Giancarlo Giannini fails to shoot Mussolini because he falls in love; in the Seduction of Mimi his machismo belies his communism and ultimately forces him to collaborate with the Mafia; in Swept Away he forsakes his peasant wife and children for the socialite Raffaella. Though Wertmuller sees herself as a political filmmaker, the emotional message of her films is that political ideas and action are irrelevant to people's lives. She offers as an alternative only a romantic pessimism embodied in passionate, irrational love of the most traditional sort...
This particular allegiance seems so intensely pathological, however, that Wertmuller weakens her thesis and un settles the movie dramatically. Raffaella is too shrill at the beginning, then too eager for the fine assortment of humiliations Gennarino has to offer. There is the sense that Wertmuller herself almost revels in the punishment Gennarino deals out; certainly the sequences of Raffaella's subjugation are among the most strident and unpleasant in recent mem ory. It is discomfiting, especially in a movie made by a woman, to see the ma jor female character turned into such an abject creature. The fact that...