If the warring couple in Swept Away represents the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, here the pair stuck in a love/hate relationship with no exit represents the Old and New Worlds. Giannini plays a rumpled, chauvinist Communist reporter, Bergen an elegant, liberal bourgoise-turned-feminist from San Francisco. This time comedy takes a back seat to drama, as the two try living with and without each other, failing at both. Like Swept Away, the underrated Night Full of Rain again reveals the basis for Wertmüller's tragicomic vision of politics to lie in a kind of anti-Hegelian anarchism – the two lovers attract as opposites, but with an attraction that makes any synthesis between them impossible.