alr

Swept Away AKA Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August
(Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzuro mare d'agosto)

Screening on Film
Directed by Lina Wertmüller.
With Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato.
Italy, 1974, 35mm, color, 116 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

Swept Away's story is as simple and vivid as a folk tale, or a dirty joke. Cruising the Mediterranean on her yacht, a beautiful, haughty bourgeoise (Melato) flaunts her disdain for her hulking Communist manservant (Giannini). Once they are shipwrecked on a deserted island, however, the tables turn with a vengeance. While Swept Away is often read as a wicked subversion of feminism, Wertmüller has explained that gender is simply a symbol in a fable not about the war between the sexes, but about the war between the classes. Paired by Wertmüller for the third time, Melato and Giannini spark beautifully in this anarchic, and anarchist, updating of The Taming of the Shrew.

Part of film series

Read more

The Disorder of Things
A Lina Wertmüller Retrospective

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait