Swept Away (1974)
Last night I watched a movie called Swept Away. Or, Swept Away … By An Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. Or, if you want to get SERIOUS, Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto. Intense already, right?
Well, this movie is hopelessly going to be known as the 1974 Italian film that was remade into something starring Madonna and this other guy whose name escapes me, but who is apparently the son of the guy who played the same role in the original? That seems a little perverted, actually. The existence of the remake is, as with most American remakes of foreign movies, always unavoidable. (I heard someone in a video store say the other day, “Have you seen this? It’s the Spanish Vanilla Sky.” I did not even like Vanilla Sky, nor have I seen Abre Los Ojos, but I still wanted to punch that lady right in the face. Don’t even get me started on when they change the endings and stuff, ala The Vanishing or Insomnia. Anyway.)
I don’t see how this movie would work without the furious Italian dialogue. People can yell very well in many languages, I’m sure, but by the end of the first five minutes I knew that it just could not be the same in another language. Or with another actress. Man, she made me want to hit her, I spent so much of the movie just waiting for when she was going to shut up, and I’m sure a good contingency of the general audience felt the same way, which automatically puts us on the side of Gennarino, at least for awhile.
Although this movie seemed very straightforward at the time I watched it, curled up in bed alone, tucked under the covers, I have spent most of this following day teasing out its possible meanings and layers. It is unavoidably intriguing. I understand that the director and screenwriter, Lina Wertmuller, was a well-known feminist and leftist, and that just makes me think MORE things. I would not want to ruin the plot of this movie, even as its own cover makes it evident.
Needless to say, two tanned half-naked Italian people end up washed ashore somewhere and it gets sexy. But it also gets violent and scary, but it also gets tender and insightful? What the hell movie, just give me something I can easily grasp! That last statement being a compliment, of course. There is an unbelievable amount of ambiguity at play for what seemed like a straightforward film at the time. We would have to pick just ONE thing to discuss to start: sex, or love, or politics, or money, or desperation, or even religion. There’s a lot, dammit. And they all blend together, leaving an attentive viewer with a lot to say. I wish I had another viewer to discuss it with instead of online message boards with comments from six years ago that quickly derail into weird yelling.
My general feeling about this movie is that it is not about love, though its characters profess it to be. It seems to be more about two people who are either personally or situationally unable to understand or experience what love really is, as they are both missing some component of deepest honesty with themselves about who they are. I am, at this stage in my life, convinced that being able to experience and express love requires a certain amount of self-knowledge and expression of that knowledge. Simply being stranded and then consistently elated by orgasmic chemicals while in a slavery/prostitution situation in a subsistence lifestyle doesn’t seem to count. Or perhaps, to moralize, I don’t feel like it should count.
Although Gennarino and Raffaella both speak of how things should be, or how they started, or ideas such as being the “original man and woman,” I don’t think that advocacy of this regression is best, regardless of how sexy it is. Whatever passion or understanding these characters reach on their deserted island dissipates quickly, or is rendered irrelevant, when even the possibility of being rescued presents itself. Something about each character appears to be revealed during the course of the film, most obviously that each of these hard-bitten characters has something soft and tender on the inside, some shape of themselves that requires love or attention, but those revelations are not carried back to the mainland, I don’t think, not in any way that matters.
It is in this way that it seems obvious we’re dealing with characters who are no more than puppets that Wertmuller can use to teach us something about, well, everything. The intersections of money, power, sex, and love. I cannot profess to know her intent, but I know that what I saw was a film about two people broken beyond the ability to love OR (if you want to interpret the film as the two of them actually finding love) the inability to believe in its transformative power. With all the attention paid to politics and class division, it is tempting to say that they are divided by their own circumstances, and that the larger power structures are what destroy the possibility of love. However, that seems to let them off a bit too easily, as much of an apologist as I am. Each side of the haves and have-nots is missing something - that would be the broadest and kindest way to interpret them, if we are to see them as human beings and not thematic instruments.
I remember a high school teacher once saying (in jest?), “Poor people cannot love.” He said it simply and truthfully, he challenged us to include the demands of money when we consider what it is we call “love.” It is this phrase I keep coming back to when I think about this movie. But instead of using it to try and determine if the rich, or the poor, characters were experiencing true love, I am searching for the nugget of truth I can insert into the hypothetical non-monied situation. What is “poor” or “rich” when no money is changing hands, and does it still create the same idea of love? The capable man can feel it, but the powerless woman cannot? Is love condescending or sacrificial?
It seems it is neither, or that each person involved (depending on what they already have or don’t have) defines it differently. It’s this gap in understanding, created by differences in gender, class, or politics, that needs to somehow be bridged, and I think Wertmuller may be hinting that sex, although basic, fundamental, primitive, instinctual, and FUN, is not the way to do it. It is only a temporary fix, and doesn’t provide a path to changing the larger structures that create the problem in the first place, not without accompanying dialogue, not without living in truth.
I am reminded also of the bell hooks book I read recently wherein she describes the difficulty early feminists she knew had with espousing feminist principles in the bedroom. Their ideology was all in the right place in their minds, but between the sheets it fell apart and patriarchy stepped back in. It seems that, as human beings, not as apes and not as hyper-mental aliens, we need both sides, the physical and the verbal (since isn’t that what really separates us?) to work in unison if we hope to create some kind of love that is equally pleasurable and fulfilling to both the haves and have-nots. Sex is only one part of it, a strong and intoxicating part, but certainly not the whole picture.
yaaaaaaaay for rambling
