Island Idyl

By JAY COCKS

SWEPT AWAY BY AN UNUSUAL DESTINY IN THE BLUE SEA OF AUGUST

Directed and Written by UNA WERTMULLER

A man and a woman are alone on one of those small volcanic islands in the middle of the Mediterranean. Raffaella (Mariangela Melato) is brash, overbearing, given to pronouncements like "To save Italy, all Italians should be put on a reservation." One of her yachting friends describes her offhandedly as "the biggest ball-breaker at sea." She is a source of sour fury to Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), a committed member of the Communist Party who is working as a deck hand on a chartered yacht that shuttles Raffaella, her husband and their affluent friends on a listless cruise. Raffaella is everything Gennarino hates, and she treats him like a serf. They are made for each other.

Late one afternoon, Raffaella decides to go for a dip and makes Gennarino ferry her in a dinghy to join her friends at a swimming spot. Their motor conks out and the current carries them away, surrendering them after two nights at sea to a deserted island. Raffaella is forced to abandon all her cherished prejudices in the name of survival. She becomes fully, servilely dependent on Gennarino, who has been liberated by the isolation of the island. He berates, abuses, beats, taunts and rapes Raffaella, all, as he thinks, in the cause of proletarian revenge. She loves it. Soon she is on her knees, calling Gennarino "Sir" and kissing his feet.

Muddled Parable. Swept Away and so on is the work of the gifted woman director Lina Wertmuller, 43, a onetime assistant of Fellini's, who has made some bright, funny and forceful movies of her own (Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi). Here, like her hero, Wertmuller has got sex and politics rather muddled up. It seems reasonably clear that she means her movie to be a wry and sometimes anguished parable of political corruption and betrayal: the rich woman from the north of Italy, so disdainful and aloof, becomes the willing victim and eager slave of her working-class paramour from the south. Gennarino is an unlikely synthesis of D.H. Lawrence's gamekeeper and J.M. Barrie's Admirable Crichton, but he has a galvanizing effect on Raffaella. She wants to be brutalized. His slaps and kicks arouse her, and at a moment of almost idyllic intimacy, she begs him to sodomize her. When a boat comes into view, she hides. Finally found and brought back to civilization, the couple yearn only for their island. Gennarino makes arrangements for a fishing boat to carry them off again, but instead Raffaella flies away in a helicopter with her husband. So allegiances between classes, however passionate initially, are always impermanent.

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 Actors Melato and Giannini, who starred together as well in Love and Anarchy and The Seduction of Mimi, are so wonderfully skillful only tips the movie's emotional imbalance further. They bring an awk ward poignancy, a true but misplaced tenderness to Wertmuller's ruthless and unruly romance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.