Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

leif This movie is a bit odd and it is a bit long. However, it is impossible not to watch. While I do think most of it can be taken as being highly allegorical I prefer to watch it on a simple surface level. It is too easy to reduce its characters to being representatives of political systems and when you do this you miss the emotional heart of the story. It is a sort of odd love story about opposites who connect on a secluded island. The film features some completely ridiculous dialog and lots of shouting. Some of the physical violence is off putting but these people go through a "primal" experience therefore certain walls must be broken down in order for this to happen so the violence sort of works and then again it sort of does not. In many ways this is like watching a love story unfold between two violent, largely unlikeable people. Fascinating.

Arriflex1 Back in the 1970's Lina Wertmuller was an art-house superstar. But more importantly, she was a first class original, bursting with a fresh, exciting vision. Now, here's a lively storyline: a rich, racist, reactionary female- a right wing, fascist mind in a knuckle-biting, voluptuous body -is stranded on a mid-sea desert isle with a poverty-stricken, chauvinistic, Communist male- a left-leaning propagandist in a scrawny masculine body. "Make nice" they don't. Well, not right off the bat. Not before much nasty invective and grievous bodily assault take place. But then afterward....ahh, afterward.SWEPT AWAY, though a foreign film, is in the manic, irreverent, well-timed tradition of Hollywood screwball comedies like THE AWFUL TRUTH(1937), MIDNIGHT(1939), THE LADY EVE(1941), and most emphatically, HIS GIRL FRIDAY(1940)- only with a shipload more profane repartee, orgiastic lust, and bone-crunching physicality than was ever permissible or desirable in those older classics. Throwing all vestiges of caution to the four winds, Wertmuller really surprises the viewer with her take on the battle of the genders strained through a volcanic political dialectic.Upon its initial release many in the audience demurred strongly (and still do) as the male's dominance slipped into outright brutality. Certainly, Wertmuller can be accused of going too far, but never of boring us. Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangelo Melato are absolutely letter perfect: sulking, teasing, attacking, retreating, seducing, rampaging, abandoning. Their director spurs them through an emotional and physical gauntlet and they meet each dramatic challenge with winning artistry. You may feel wrung out by film's end. Or enraged. Or both. But you'll have quite a time.

David Downing SWEPT AWAY is a genuinely artistic, intelligent, and thought-provoking film that uses a simple story to deal with many complicated issues. However, it's also a product of the school of thought that advocates (1) frustrating audience expectations in the name of artistic evolution, and (2) being as downbeat as possible in the name of realism. The result is a film that I can appreciate at an intellectual level, but can't genuinely enjoy at some deeper gut level.The story is a variation on a theme that's probably as old as literature itself -- the role reversal that results from a master and servant being "swept away" from a world governed by the master's rules and into a world governed only by the law of survival. The master in this case is Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato), a high-society lady to whom reheated coffee and undercooked spaghetti are major crises. (In fact, the spaghetti was NOT undercooked; Raffaella had never heard of al dente.) Ms. Lanzetti is also offended by the hired help's sweaty T-shirts, apparently unaware that if you perform manual labor in the hot summer sun and the hotter galley of your husband's yacht, a significant amount of sweat is inevitable. The servant is Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini), one of the workers on the yacht, who suffers the largest share of Raffaella 's complaining and derision. In the first part of the film, Gennarino spends much time muttering about how he'd like to get his hand on Raffaella for five minutes.Gennarino gets to act on his stored-up anger when he and Raffaella get stranded on a deserted island. And herein lies the first example of the film deliberately frustrating the audience. A traditional drama would let us see one character as the hero and the other as the villain. Or, possibly, we'd be asked to see both of them as heroes, villains, or mixed bags. In any case, we'd be able to decide who we were going to sympathize with throughout the story. But SWEPT AWAY continually turns the tables on you. Until they get to the island, your heart is going out to Gennarino, and you would dearly love to dump a plate of that al dente spaghetti on Raffaella 's head. (BTW, you actually get to see something like that happen in the Madonna remake.) But when the worm turns, the "lesson" Gennarino gives Raffaella is so cruel, brutal, and sadistic that it seems way out of proportion to the offense she committed against him -- especially since it goes on so relentlessly for so long. Furthermore, we realize that Raffaella 's attitude toward Gennarino wasn't so much due to malice as ignorance. Her high-society world is all she knows. And we wonder if Gennarino should perhaps have taken that into account. We also wonder if Gennarino really is the vile creature that Raffaella has accused him of being.But we're forced to switch sympathies yet again -- back to Gennarino -- when they get off the island. By this time, they've fallen in love -- or so they believe -- which begs the question of what's going to happen to their relationship when they get back to Raffaella 's high-society world.I can't tell you what happens, but I will tell you that the message we're left with is not the one I suspect we were supposed to expect. I'm guessing we're supposed to hope for an upbeat statement about how these two different classes of people can learn from each other. Instead SWEPT AWAY seems to be saying that's a bunch of hogwash, contrary to what you and the two main characters might have wanted to believe.Of course that could just be the truth, and the upbeat message I spoke of could be trite and corny, which SWEPT AWAY definitely isn't. The power struggle and love/hate relationship between Raffaella and Gennarino serves as a vehicle to explore a lot of complicated issues about class struggles and conflicting values, and maybe where we end up is where the filmmaker honestly believes all this exploring is supposed to take you.But the end result -- for me, at least -- is that SWEPT AWAY might be a great material for a master's thesis, but not for a fun evening.

morgan1976 I really loved this movie. I have to admit I only saw this because I heard of Madonna's remake and my love for the Goldie Hawn movie "Overboard", but...wow! Interesting, romantic, powerful, hard-to-watch, political, funny, sad, etc. This movie has it all. You can analyze this movie to death, but it will do it a disservice. Quite simply, it's about a bizarre romance that happens when two people who are total opposites, thus hating each other, are stranded on a remote island and must learn how to live together. By today's standards, this is a very un-P.C. movie: Male domination over a woman. However, it IS just a movie, not real life--don't let that put you off; and there are some scenes that are hard to take, but given the context of the characters, you might think to yourself--"is this deserved?" I think some parts are, and others--not at all. You might like this film if you liked Pedro Almodovar's "Atame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!)". This is a film you'll end up discussing with others after you've seen it. Also, I don't recommend viewing this around children or very impressionable teenagers.