Movie Description
Swept Away is a 1974 Italian adventure comedy-drama film written and directed by Lina Wertmuller and starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. The film is about a wealthy woman whose yachting vacation with friends in the Mediterranean Sea takes an unexpected turn when she and one of the boat's crew are separated from the others and they become stranded on a deserted island. The woman's capitalist beliefs and the man's communist convictions clash, but during their struggle to survive their situation, their social roles are reversed. Swept Away received the 1975 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Award for Top Foreign Film. The original English title of the film was a translation of the original Italian title: Swept Away... by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. The English title was later truncated to Swept Away in subsequent releases.
In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times, American film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, his highest rating. Ebert wrote that the film "resists the director's most determined attempts to make it a fable about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and persists in being about a man and a woman. On that level, it's a great success." Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Swept Away "the most successful fusion of Miss Wertmuller's two favorite themes, sex and politics, which are here so thoroughly and so successfully tangled that they become a single subject, like two people in love."