Pros: Courageous study of classism and sexism; strong performances; bare skin
Cons: Violent and explicit sexual content
The Bottom Line: Creatively structured approach to illuminating two important kinds of discrimination and subjugation: classism and sexism. Great performances. Highly recommended but NOTE that there are graphic portrayals of sexual violence.
Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
You turned the tables on me
And now I’m falling for you.
You turned the tables on me.
I can’t believe that it’s true!
I always thought when you brought
The lovely present you bought
Why hadn’t you brought me more?
But now if you’d come
I’d welcome anything from
The five and ten cent store.
You used to call me the top.
You put me up on a throne.
You let me fall with a drop,
And now I’m out on my own.
But after thinking it over and over,
I got what was coming to me.
Just like the sting of a bee
You turned the tables on me.
From You Turned the Tables on Me, sung by Martha Tilton,
with the Benny Goodman Orchestra
What a great theme song that would have made for Swept Away, the 1974 Italian film by director Lina Wertmüller. Well . . . except for the one line, of course, “I got what was coming to me.” With Swept Away (originally released as Swept Away . . . By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) already viewed as anathema by the women’s movement, the addition of a line like that one in a theme song might have gotten Lina Wertmüller castrated – except, of course, Lina Wertmüller is and always has been a woman. Yeh, one of the ironies of this interesting film is that many viewers, especially female ones, believe it to be an onerous, misogynistic affront to women despite it being the artistic creation of a woman. Well, it’s been said before that Jews can be anti-Jewish, so I guess it follows that a woman can be anti-women. But, I just don’t think that its true in this instance! I’ll come back to that later.
Characters and Plot This is a film with only two main characters and a relatively simple plot (it’s more of an issues kind of movie than a straight forward narrative). The principles are Raffaella (Mariangela Melato) and Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini). Raffaella is the upper class wife of a rich man, spoiled and overbearing. In appearance, she is thin, blond, and light-skinned. She’s rather pretty, as well, if you can get past her shrill and bitchy manner and ignorant assumptions. Her behavior is arrogant and snobbish, especially to the deck hands on the yacht where she and her upper crust friends are spending some leisure time. One of those deckhands if a scraggly working-class stiff named Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini). He is a swarthy Italian trying to eek out a meager living doing chores for a yacht-owner who provides excursions for the leisure class. It’s not work that he enjoys doing because it rubs directly up against his communist sympathies and hatred for capitalists.
Raffaella treats all of those working on board like dirt, but seems to have singled out Gennarino for special abuse. She complains incessantly about his work, berates him because the pasta is overcooked for her taste, calls him the ugly “n” word (referring to his swarthiness), and is generally loathsome in her condescension. Moreover, in spirited conversation with one of her wealthy but liberal companions, Raffaella reveals her right-wing capitalist predilections and is at no little pains to attribute all the afflictions of the lower classes to their indolence and ignorance. As an assertive woman of wealth, she obviously believes in gender equality but strongly endorses class distinctions. Even her wealthy companion appears ill-equipped to suffer her barrage of bigotry.
She spends her day lounging around in a bikini, playing cards, and sometimes sun-tanning topless in front of the deck hands as if they were neutered. She wonders aloud why Gennarino smells so bad. Doesn’t he wash? Gennarino, the principal victim of her abuse wins our sympathy accordingly, although he does come off as a bit of a whiner, grumbling epithets like “Dirty whore” under his breath. Many Italian working class men are somewhat misogynistic, and his choice of labels for her suggests that he is no exception. Clearly, social status and financial power are the defining elements in the social dynamic on this yacht. His opportunities for work are limited, he is thus dependent on the wealthy (like Raffaella), and must tolerate her abuse or be fired. He can complain under his breath, but not openly. He is basically socially impotent. At this point, viewers despise her and feel sympathy for him.
While the others are exploring an island, Raffaella, who had stayed behind, orders Gennarino to take her in the dinghy to a spot that she has picked out for a swim. She overrides his every objection, even when he suggests that they are getting dangerously far from the yacht. When the engine of the dinghy conks out, it turns out that they have traveled too far to get back unassisted. She berates him for the failure of the motor and his inability to fix it. They are so far from the yacht that their absence goes unnoticed while they continue to drift further out of sight. Soon, they are out of sight of all land and vessels. Gennarino finally manages to fix the motor, but there is nothing in sight except the Mediterranean in any direction and they have no navigation equipment. Gennarino points out that it would be fruitless and possibly counterproductive to motor off in a haphazard direction. All night and into the next day, they continue to float aimlessly, with neither food nor water. Finally they spot land, but instead of a familiar landscape, it is an uninhabited island well out in Mediterranean. They have been swept away from their party and from all of civilization.
The island has a desolate, almost barren landscape. It quickly becomes apparent that the old dynamic between this lost pair has changed. He is in possession of basic survival skills, knows how to find food, build a fire, and locate shelter. She, given her sheltered and pampered life, is utterly useless and helpless in this setting. Her wealth has no currency on a deserted island. The tables have now turned! She desperately needs him for survival and he is ill-disposed to humor her demands. If she wants his help in surviving, she will have to provide services for him: cooking, menial chores, washing his underwear, and so forth. In this world, it is his skills that have value and that define status. It is his ideology, based on class equality but male dominance, that will now determine the social order. He quickly becomes increasingly domineering and, finally, brutally abusive. He smacks her across the face when she talks back to him. In one heated exchange, he pushes her down a sand dune, throws her to the ground, subdues her, rips off her clothes, and starts to rape her, then stops at the last minute as if to assert that he can take her or not as he sees fit. It’s his right as the man. Freed from the humiliation of class servitude, he feels renewed potency. He requires her to engage in overt exhibitions of submissiveness. He taunts her with epithets like “capitalist whore” or “capitalist bitch.” As he hits her, he itemizes his long-harbored list of political complaints, “This one is for thirty years of the Christian Democrats.” She, however, is not allowed to complain when she is struck – just as he could not complain aloud about her abuse when they were on the yacht.
Dependent as she is on Gennarino for survival, she gradually settles into a submissive role. His dominance and her submission become a kind of dance of sexual attraction. They begin to fall in love with one another. This, of course, is one of the aspects of the story that most irritates feminists. It not only flies in the face of feminist philosophy, but, more importantly, one of the top priorities of the feminist agenda: the empowerment of women who are in abusive relationships so that they can find their way out. The idea that Raffaella would start to love a man who is abusing her seems antithetical to that feminist effort.
Certainly, every effort should be expended to encourage woman in abusive relationships to extricate themselves as quickly as possible. Recognizing that victims sometimes voluntarily enter such relationships or allow them to escalate is merely recognizing the full range of factors that allow such relationships to occur; it is not condoning them. Many social commentators recognize, for example, that some girls are attracted to so-called “bad boys.” We also recognize that children, adolescents and even, adults sometimes opt for negative attention in preference to no attention, when positive attention is unavailable. We know that dominant and submission relationship have existed both in and out of the sexual domain throughout human history. Acknowledging those human tendencies is not condoning or accepting abuse. It’s merely part of understanding it.
Moreover, Raffaella and Gennarino were cast inadvertently into a situation where survival became the preeminent issue, as if they had been thrown back into prehistoric times where strength and survival skill alone determined dominance. It is right that women in modern society should be regarded as equal and not subjugated, but had a tribe somewhere in prehistoric times adopted such a social system, it would likely have been soon routed by its competitors. There is no inference, in the film, that the relationship developed by this stranded duo is worthy of emulation in a civilized world.
The inevitable question that must arise in this story is what will happen when the pair ultimately return to civilization. She doesn’t want it to happen because she recognizes (while denying it) that it would kill their relationship. He, on the other hand, cannot feel satisfied that she has truly surrendered herself to him unless she gives up by choice all of her old life for him. Obviously, his idea here is utter folly driven by an overactive male ego. When they are, in fact, rescued, the stage is set for another rendition of “You turned the tables on me . . .”
Themes: I touched above on why this film is controversial. Now I’ll suggest why it need not be. This film is a small gem that raises some fundamental questions from which most film directors run like the wind. Wertmüller’s design for this film cleverly works two major issues, class warfare and the battle between the sexes, against one another so that we better understand each. She has adopted a no-holds barred approach that tears open each of her themes. By shifting the balance of power between the two protagonists – not once, but twice – she grates the issues back and forth until they have been shredded apart and the inner stuffing revealed.
Let me offer four observations, based on what I’ve learned about discrimination over years of conversations about the topic, that will help put this film into proper context:
1. Most people are both victims and perpetrators of discrimination, whether they recognize it or not. We see this clearly in the case of Raffaella and Gennarino. She discriminates on the basis of class and skin color but is victimized by Gennerino’s sexism. He discriminates based on gender, but is victimized because he is poor and swarthy. This first principle is not meant to suggest in any way, however, that we are all victims or perpetrators to the same extent. Some people are highly victimized and have little opportunity to contribute to discrimination. Others inflict a lot of subjugation on others while suffering little themselves. As a corollary to this first principle, when shifted from victim status to power status, most people will increase the extent to which they discriminate and subjugate others. This is merely a variation on the old saw: power corrupts. When we function collectively, we behave even worse. We conquer, colonize, enslave, and economically exploit. Then we justify it all as divine right, manifest destiny, bringing God’s word to the heathens, or as unfortunate but necessary to maintain one’s quality of life.
2. People are far more likely to recognize victimization when they are victims than when they are perpetrators. We learn to ignore, deny, or rationalize the kinds of victimization that benefit us while rankling over our own instances of suffering victimization. Blacks in America talk about racism more than whites. Gays ruminate about homophobia far more than straights. Over-weight people talk about weight discrimination more than slender people. Women invest far more time discussing gender discrimination than men.
3. The various kinds of discrimination change in importance from place to place and from time to time. I won’t dwell on all the obvious examples, but will instead mention examples especially relevant to understand Swept Away. First, Europeans have more overt consciousness of class issues than those in America because of their long history of class struggle, from the emergence out of the serfdom of the middle ages, to the struggle in England that culminated in the Magna Carta, to the French revolution, possibly the most traumatic event in the French psyche. These were all fundamentally class struggles – not wars of one nation or ethnic group against another. Although classism exists in America (and is, in my opinion, the most damaging kind of discrimination of all in practice), most Americans are largely unaware of it because it lies masked behind a number of our cherished but false myths: that America functions as a democracy, that it provides opportunity for all, and that concentration of most of the nation’s wealth in the hands of a small percentage of people (i.e., the upper class) is a necessary consequence of the capitalist incentive system. Second, the manifestation of “racism” in Europe goes beyond what Americans understand the term to mean, extending to the difference between people of swarthy vs. light complexion. A film that will drive this point home for you, if you like, is Brusati’s masterpiece, Bread and Chocolate (1974), in which an Italian immigrant in Switzerland encounters deep prejudice in relation to his skin tone.
4. All kinds of victimization by discrimination are evil but not equally evil. This is an important point in understanding the controversy regarding Swept Away. Murder, torture, prolonged unjust confinement, slavery, and rape are all examples of the highest order of subjugation, resulting in the most severe kinds of imposition on human freedoms. Social or economic subjugation -- discrimination based on color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical characteristics, or medical problems -- can also be devastating, at times, but the impacts are not quite as all-encompassing or immediate in effect as the highest order infringements. I have learned, from my experiences at a highly diverse University, that people get rightly upset when one kind of discrimination is likened to another, especially if the one being used as the analogy reflects a higher level of subjugation. Hyperbole is not good practice in discussions of discrimination. For example, if a privileged white, teenage girl complains to her mother, “Mom, you treat me like a slave”, that will stick in the craw of a person whose grandfather was actually enslaved. Likening religious indoctrination to mental rape, for another example, will quickly incur the wrath of feminists. In Swept Away, Wertmüller has used two kinds of discrimination (classism/racism and sexism) to help illuminate one another, but unfortunately, there is an inequality between these two kinds of discrimination with respect to how closely each strikes at the core of human dignity. Rape violates personal integrity and denies choice entirely. By contrast, Gennarino’s choices for employment may have been constrained, but he is not obligated to work on the yacht and submit to Raffaella’s abuse. His choices are certainly diminished by classism, but Raffaella’s freedom of choice was completely taken from her by his assaults.
Add to that (drawing on point #2 above) that every viewer who watches this film brings their own set of experiences with discrimination. Some have suffered from sexism, others from classism, some from neither, some from both. A young upper middle class female viewer, for example, probably relates to the issue of sexism or has even felt its sting, but is unlikely to be especially attuned to classism. A young male viewer who grew up in poverty may care little about sexism and be deeply scarred by classism. Therefore, the balancing act that Wertmüller attempted between these two highly important kinds of discrimination and subjugation will work far better for some viewers than for others. For viewers who care much more about one of the two issues than the other, relating the two will only cause anger. Here are a few examples from reviews of this film published elsewhere: “the politics of [Wertmüller’s] movies consistently leave me cold”, the film “manages to be fairly offensive”, and Wertmüller “never chastises him for his eagerness to dominate.” One reviewer argues that the introduction of class issues “creates biases that are hard to overcome . . . instead of simply being a battle of the sexes.” That reviewer would have preferred a film that made a clear statement in opposition to sexism and its severest manifestation, rape, without confusing that message by juxtaposing sexism against classism. Presumably the reviewer is comparatively disinterested in classism. Wertmüller’s express intent, however, was to work the two against one another. Another reviewer states in relation to the abuse of Raffaella on the island that “nobody deserves this kind of treatment”, while Wertmüller’s point is that nobody deserves either sexual or economic subjugation.
Bottom-Line Wertmüller produced Swept Away while she was at her professional peak – and it shows. Her next film, Seven Beauties (1976), earned her a nomination as Best Director, the first woman ever to be so honored. With Swept Away, Wertmüller has given us biting, satirical political commentary that has also struck a perfect balance between comedy, drama, and tragedy. She eschewed realism for a kind of fantasy that provided the perfect laboratory for analyzing the core themes. The two leads were highly effective in parts made difficult by the changes that take place over the course of the film in each character’s state of mind and behaviors.
If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, Swept Away has had more than its share of flattery, having been “remade” not once, but twice. The first remake was a romantic comedy, basically, called Seven Days, Seven Nights, starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche. It’s a film that I have enjoyed more than once but which possesses nowhere near the depth or bite of Swept Away. Both the class issues and the sexism were watered down by the demands of political correctness to mere spice. The second remake, undertaken by Guy Ritchie with his wife Madonna in the female lead is, by most accounts, the weakest of the three films.
Swept Away is in Italian with English subtitles and has a running time of 143 minutes. Wertmüller effectively accomplished what she set out to do, which was to stimulate thinking about two important kinds of discrimination and subjugation: classism and sexism. These are two issues that evoke intense emotion, but each in degrees that vary from person to person. For those who care much more about one of the two issues than the other, Wertmüller’s attempt to play them off against one another will inevitably generate hostility. In the end, however, discrimination and subjugation can only be diminished in human society when people are forced to think not so much about the varieties by which they are victimized but about the varieties that they themselves perpetuate, consciously or unconsciously.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Italy:
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