Here at the Screengrab, we have an irregularly scheduled feature known as "Forgotten Films", which we use to discuss beloved, or at least interesting, movies that seem to have fallen through the cracks of moviegoers' memories. But what about those films that, while deservedly forgotten, will never be forgotten enough for some people's liking? Films that, in addition to sucking like a Hoover and a half, can only serve to represent the sore spots that their makers would much, much rather they'd never booked into theaters and charged admission? To inaugurate what we suspect will be an even more irregularly scheduled feature devoted to these very special films, today we exhume Guy Ritchie's Swept Away.
THE MOVIE: The British writer-director's third feature is a remake of Lina Wertmuller's 1974 cocktail-chatter classic (whose full title is Swept Away...by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), with Ritchie's wife, Madonna, and the Italian actor Adriano Giannini taking over the roles originated by the luscious comedienne Mariangelo Melato and Wertmuller's favorite leading man (and Adriano's father) Giancarlo Giannini. Madonna is an obnoxious, motor-mouthed rich bitch--excuse the sexist characteriation, but in both the original film and the remake, that's very much the idea--whose rich tycoon husband (Bruce Greenwood) has plunked her down on a yacht touring the Mediterranean. The ship's fisherman (Giannini) takes exception to her non-stop prattling, her hateful attitude, and her politics, and when, through an outrageously contrived quirk of circumstance, they wind up stranded together on a deserted island, where her money counts for nothing and she is dependent on his manly survivor skills, he takes full advantage of the tables having been turned. Their new relationship begins with him whacking her repeatedly in the face and quickly blossoms into a heated love affair. But then they are rescued, and the movie dares to ask: can the crazed-rutting-weasels romance between a rich dame and a working-class stud survive the artificial pressures that society will thrown up against it?
WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Swept Away would have looked pretty strange even to a visitor from Mars, but to understand it at all, one has to have seen Lina Wertmuller's version, so that at least one can understand how the elements worked in the original conception and how they've been watered-down in this "reimagining." This is not meant as an actual endorsement of Wertmuller's movie, which is shrill and simplistic and rather badly made. But she enjoyed a brief, intense vogue in the mid-70s because she was prepared to play with fire onscreen, politically, emotionally, and sexually. Even though it was made by a woman, the original Swept Away... is a rape fantasy, with a veneer of political commentary. Giancarlo Giannini's character, a self-declared Communist who more than kept up with his capitalist debating partner in the gasbag department, didn't just belt Melato around, he commenced their "affair" by taking her by force. She in turn, was so grateful to him for using his superior physical strength to make a real woman of her that when he woke up, he found that she had gathered wild flowers and used them to decorate his genitals. Wertmuller was able to sell this to a chic, intellectual film audience by first establishing that Melato's character represented the bourgeoisie and Giannini was the embodiment of the poor laboring class on whose throat she had her foot. So their time on the island can be "interpreted" not as a man enslaving a woman, who discovers that she loves being submissive to him, but as the working class punishing the moneyed classes, who are forced to admit that they had it coming to them. (In one interview, Wertmuller went so far as to respond to the charge of misogyny by insisting that Melato's character was "really a man." I know all there is to know about the crying game, and this is ridiculous.) As to the question of whether the affair can survive outside the island, Wertmuller answered that one with a resounding "No." Once the two are rescued and return to Italy, the spell is broken and the woman cannot resist returning to the life of privilege that excludes the honest working stiff with a copy of Das Kapital in his back pocket and a necklace of posies on his prick.
As you might expect, Ritchie was a lot less interested in seeing how long he could keep his audience glued to their seats with an action-packed debate about the role of the masses in capitalist society. And in 2002, the pro-Communist blather would have had people staring blankly at the screen, wondering if they had a brain tumor that had just suddenly kicked in. (Even Wertmuller, with her mean joker's temperament, wasn't sure how to treat this stuff in the original, appearing sympathetic to the Giannini character's views but treating the man himself as a coarse boob.) There is a token effort made to engage the issues of class warfare, but it's kept pretty much on the level of Madonna mewling, "If you ask me, [capitalism]'s a lot better than Communism." One side effect of this is that the scenes in which the bitch takes evident pleasure in humiliating and insulting the thug, which in the original were meant to be sexually charged demonstrations of Marx in action, look more like outtakes from Body of Evidence, the S & M courtroom thriller in which Madonna's black widow-dominatrix character tried to fuck Frank Langella to death and applied hot wax to the cadaverous chest of Willem Dafoe. Although Ritchie's name is on the picture, Madonna's influence seems strong, and as with everything else she's ever done, the message seems to be that the best way to address anything--the class system, gender warfare, surviving on a desert island--is to dig a hole in the sand and settle in for a good screw. Neither she nor Giannini gives any evidence here of being able to act a lick--although she's uncharacteristically convincing when she gets to express gratitude to him for dominating her, a T.M.I. moment that just makes the viewer uncomfortable. (Let's not even get started on the fact that her character, "Amber Leighton", is reportedly named for Ritchie's mum.) Much of the film just looks a lot like every music video in which Madonna has justified her love to some surly-looking, unshaven hunk with tight abs and no personality. The relationship is all about sex now, and it's less nasty than in the original--their first sex in the remake is consensual--but that only serves to make it all seem that much more insipid. So does the ending, where the big factor keeping the two of them apart in civilization is her husband, not her feelings.
WHY IT COULDN'T POSSIBLY EVER BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: In case you haven't heard--hey, seriously, presidential election, Wall Street bailout, season finale of Project Runway, there's been a lot going on--Madonna and Guy Ritchie's divorce plans hit the wires yesterday. They were married for eight years, during which time her career remained basically stable and his sank from the weight of four failed follow-ups to his 1999 debut feature Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. (I am, perhaps a bit presumptively, including his latest, RocknRolla, which premiered last week to muffled cries of, "Jesus, this fast-cutting British gangster shit again!?" Madonna's directorial debut, which bears the disarmingly on-the-nose title Filth and Wisdom, joins it in theaters this weekend.) Swept Away, their major collaboration not counting their son Rocco, is the most obvious cultural by-product of their union, and for vultures looking for clues as to the nature of their marriage and the reasons for its failure to endure, it is a gold mine. It's tempting to guess from what's on the screen that Madonna was the big instigator in the decision to remake a "controversial", once-hot property that she probably remembered reading about when she was a youngster already dreaming about making scandalous entertainment for the big city sophisticates, and that Ritchie got dragged along for the ride without ever finding a way to tie it in with what he's good at as a filmmaker: he's a one-trick pony, but he's not an untalented pony. Madonna, on the other hand, is a self-styled multimedia player whose instincts regarding movies haven't played her right since Desperately Seeking Susan. If what she really did want in a husband was a powerful dominating figure who could go toe to toe with her as an equal, it was an early sign that the marriage was doomed as soon as Ritchie signed on to direct her in a project that he never would have picked out for himself and whose likely failure was compounded by the fact that she didn't really understand it herself. On the other hand, she provides the movie's liveliest moment when, backed up by an on-screen mambo orchestra, she dances in the sand while wearing a canary-yellow dress and lip-synching to Rosemary Clooney singing, "Come on-a My House." It's a "fantasy" sequence, which here as in 99 out of a hundred other similar cases is code for, "This doesn't fit but we just wanted to do it." It doesn't belong in the movie it's a part of, but then, that movie has no other reason for existing.