Is Swept Away simple political allegory wrapped up in regressive gender ideas and a rape fantasy, or is there something more going on here? Most critics that I looked into either feel the former, or they argue that the politics of the film recontextualize the sexual abuse as a form of political revolt. None have argued that maybe the events on the island are not to be taken so straightforwardly, that perhaps the developing love between Giancarlo Giannini's Gennarino and Mariangela Melato's Raffaella is in its own way critical of cycles of violence and revenge scenarios.

I could be deluding myself. I don't know that much about Lina Wertmueller or her politics, and perhaps I'm defending this movie for the…

What do you get when a spoiled, racist, classist, selfish piece of shit woman gets lost out to sea with a proudly ignorant, violent, raging sexist, crypto-fascist man who can only get off on sex-slave rape? An indulgent, grotesque, caricature-centric, Rorschach test of a film apparently!

I almost reject that this is a fully political film as it is just a vindictive takedown of the sort of selfish pompous assholes that exist on all corners of the socioeconomic spectrum. When we're introduced to Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) he's a clear choice to side with in comparison to the haughty Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato); a poor communist deckhand who's forced to bite his tongue as he's bombarded with verbal abuse by…

The story is simple, but the implications are complex. A capitalist and a communist are stranded on an island together. Raffaella (capitalist) treats Gennarino (communist) like absolute human waste until they're trapped together and their power relation is inverted, Gennarino with all the power treating Rafaella like shit.

The simplest level to evaluate these events is the surface emotions: Gennarino is upset with Rafaella for treating him poorly, so he treats her poorly in return. This framework would make the film into a fairly basic revenge narrative, aligning the audience with Gennarino and paying off his initial suffering with the supposed poetic karmic justice meted out in the reversal of their fortunes and his subsequent punishment of Rafaella. It is,…

Upon second viewing, I find myself significantly less enamored of Swept Away than I was the first time I watched it. In part, I think, the change is due to the simple fact that I now know Lina Wertmüller's work better than I did then, which means the ideas expressed here are less striking than they were to me at first contact. In addition, the first time I saw it, I had not yet experienced the glory of what I will argue til I die is Wertmüller's masterpiece, Summer Night, a film which treads fairly similar territory, but with greater sophistication, power, and dynamism.

That said, though, Swept Away remains a movie I very much admire, and I continue to…

An exhibition of ideological futility. The human condition dictates governances; social, political and economic ways of maintaining some form of structural order, yet none of them seem to have succeeded when implemented. Fascism, for obvious reasons, is a no-go; anarchism is a thoroughly unsustainable system; capitalism is selective in its morality; communism relies on human decency. None of these systems have proven successful; they vary in efficacy but not one has been able to account for the needs of all. Communism sounds best in theory, with its emphasis on order, an equitable distribution for everybody and the elimination of class design, but reliance on collective cooperation proves a slippery slope at best. Capitalism—for all of its touted successes—consistently maintains base…

I need to watch this at least once (and probably three or four times) more before I have fully formed thoughts on it, but for now I will simply say that I adore Lina Wertmüller's messy embrace of the political potential of cinema, and the way her enthusiasm for the power of both film and humanity is smeared all over every frame of this work. In this context, the admittedly somewhat superficial comparisons made between her and Jean-Luc Godard make perfect sense to me, though where Godard eventually became way of narrative cinema's seductive power and shifted away from it, Wertmüller only intensified her embrace.

Also, based on the little I've seen of Wertmüller's work, I think the labeling of…