[Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August] is an original, a film unlike any other; the very length of its practically rococo title suggests that Lena Wertmüller wants us to be ready for anything. Yet it is not altogether without precedent; many of its ingredients are familiar enough. The recapture of some "state of nature" on a more or less conveniently placed desert island….

Swept Away and Antonioni's L'Avventura start out, and in a very real sense conclude, in much the same way. Both films place their protagonists by means of an opening sequence depicting a luxury yacht full of rich, bitchy, bored Italian socialites, adrift sexually and socially in the Mediterranean. (p. 49)

Wertmüller is not content merely to make a point; she is concerned to engage, to disturb, to accuse, to involve, to implicate. We can all establish our distance from the world of L'Avventura, for Antonioni's own detachment shows us the way; but the extremity and shrill verbal violence of reactions to Swept Away … suggests something very different from forced detachment—that Wertmüller, by virtue of her own involvement in her film's themes, has succeeded not for the first time, in engaging almost viscerally the attention and emotions of her audience.

All these points—which, taken together, suggest that Wertmüller has succeeded in accomplishing what she set out to do—may be traced back to what is the most obvious difference between her film and Antonioni's: his is chill and humorless, hers not only funny but actually, even at its most uncomfortable moments on the verge of out-and-out hilarity….

What saves Swept Away from its own comic brinkmanship is its constant, sustained proximity to other (emotional, social, sexual) brinks. Even before Rafaella and Gennarino reach the island, for example, her political prejudices (which have evident sexual overtones) have been matched by his less shrill and public, but no less obnoxious sexist prejudices (which have political overtones); the first revelation of sexism, in other words, is also and by the same token a version of class prejudice, a class prejudice that is also not uncoincidentally generously larded with sexual fantasy about the lives of the rich (orgies, drugs). This dialectic of sexism and class prejudice, and indeed of humor and insult, sets the tone of the film, which reverts to it again and again. Wertmüller is a cinematic diplomat, able to play them off against one another, though with an eye not to relieving but to heightening the tension involved in the exercise.

Swept Away is as emotionally charged as it is disturbingly funny because from its very beginning it is strung out on sexual tension and the impossibility of its final resolution. Every apparent relaxation of this tension raises it to a new level of intensity; and the tension in question is established, and sustained, both verbally and visually, which is why even the most elaborate linear plot summary cannot begin to do the film justice. Although Swept Away is shot in almost travelogue manner (with dreadful music to match—except for Gennarino's songs, perhaps), the orthodoxy of its visual style is used by Wertmüller to orchestrate her film according to the distance, within the frame or from sequence to sequence, between her protagonists. At the beginning of the film, Rafaella and Gennarino are at opposite ends of the boat (as though the social hierarchy separating them had been made horizontal); Wertmüller proceeds to draw together these seeming opposites by means of a verbal and visual counterpoint expressed in the signals each sends to the other. (p. 50)

Once Wertmüller has contracted the distance between her two central characters, by means of a pattern of attraction and repulsion, she throws them together into the close proximity of the dinghy, and then into the landscape of the island. Verbal gives way to physical brutality. Rafaella's beating is constructed around her own insults to Gennarino; he repays her, with interest, by throwing them back at her, literally and physically….

Wertmüller is concerned that her audience cherish no illusions about how deeply rooted, sexually and psychically, these obstacles are. Most dramatically, Gennarino must enslave Rafaella; she is at her most cowed when, not without sadness in his eyes, he kills, skins, and runs a stick through a rabbit he has caught (what an image!) and she says she feels "just like that little rabbit." (p. 51)

The point about Gennarino and Rafaella's love is not that it is ersatz or superficial, let alone "natural" but that it is brief and precarious. When all the obstacles apparently have been transcended, Gennarino sights the ship that is to rescue them, which is all it takes to make him revert to form—that is, to socially conditioned macho form. (pp. 51-2)

This is a key moment in the film; despite the peace and freedom from rancor we have by now seen on his face, he has to know, he needs reaffirmation—not physical but social—of his male identity, just as the logic of Rafaella's identity compels her to try to dissuade him from taking this irrevocable step. Who is being "more realistic" is here beside the point; what they both perceive is that the sexual test now, by its very nature, has become a social test too….

Wertmüller's film is about the interpenetration of sexual and class politics. Arguments about the "primacy" of one over the other are, whether we like it or not, on this view simply beside the point; the point is that she is not prepared to settle for the lame conclusion that the class struggle must take precedence over the struggle for women's liberation. The way in which Wertmüller broaches the relationship of sexual with class oppression makes it impossible to look at one without seeing the other. Swept Away is no simple-minded triumph of economics over love, because it is designed to prevent, and succeeds in preventing, our taking solace in the easy reduction of sex to politics or politics to sex; the film is about the impossibility of transcending either sexual or class roles, not because one predominates over the other, but because they work together, in tandem, to devastating effect….

The very brutalization of Rafaella by Gennarino serves as a reminder that normally, in "civilization," she is protected against any such brutality or degradation by her class position. Significantly, upon her rescue, when she is reunited with her husband, Wertmüller portrays her as enshrined, serene, wearing a black scarf around her head like a nun. (p. 52)

The other pointed contrast—one which serves the same end—is that between Gennarino's wife and Rafaella's husband…. [At] one point, she sounds like a fascist—an unassuming enough observation, considering the diatribe she has just delivered; yet for all his lack of presence he has all the easy, abstract power at his command that his assured economic position can bring. It is this power that enables us to understand Wertmüller's statement that Rafaella "represents bourgeois society, therefore she represents the man." Bourgeois values themselves are defined by men, as Wertmüller is fully aware….

[The] real measure of Rafaella's husband's power is that, thanks to it, the natural solution itself comes to seem artificial; Gennarino's almost laughable proposal—over the telephone from a gas station, a distance Wertmüller establishes with some poignancy—that Rafaella leave with him on a friend's boat and return to the island, is as impractical as it is inevitable.

Rafaella's response, by contrast, is both practical and inevitable…. We blame her for leaving, to be sure; but leave she must, by virtue of her economic status, by virtue of her easy dominance of the men who surround her—by virtue, in short, of the logic of her position and identity….

Wertmüller is determined not even to give us the comfort of a cathartic ending. She refuses to end Swept Away with the helicopter shot of Gennarino on the pier, which is what a less unorthodox director with a message to push would have done. Instead, she traces Gennarino's steps back along the jetty to the quay—to the ugly urban civilization she has already depicted, to the side of his wife (whose bag he proceeds to carry!). The two worlds, of Gennarino and his wife and Rafaella and her husband, the two worlds Wertmüller's camera has separated before our very eyes, do not cease to exist; they remain in existence as arenas in which life must go on, despite, or because of, the anguish, both sexual and social, upon which they are built. (p. 53)