THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
ROBINSON CARUSO THE SCREEN In any film that takes place on a sailing boat-Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937) and Roman Polaroid's Knife in the Water (1963) come to mind first-the director...
...The fact is that Ms...
...This is not to say, though, that Wertmuller is a sentimentalist, or that the rich pastel world she en-visions here is without sadness...
...There's too much trouble in this paradise for us to get that impression...
...All comedy is the result of some sort of incongruity or disproportion...
...When they are stranded and then marooned, it's like locking up a cobra and a mongoose in the same wicker basket...
...ROBINSON CARUSO THE SCREEN In any film that takes place on a sailing boat-Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937) and Roman Polaroid's Knife in the Water (1963) come to mind first-the director is going to find the opportunities for beautiful photography irresistible...
...Yet none of this photography ever allows us to feel that Wertmuller only wants to send us pretty picture postcards...
...Like her two earlies films, Love and Anarchy toad The Seduction-of Mind this film ends unhappily because of the foolhardiness of a man...
...Lina Wertmuller's comedy is really not a form of satire, then, but something much more personal and warm-blooded...
...He tells her nothings else matters, and she seems to assent The trouble that while they are saying these things, we are seeing them only in separate close-ups because they are no longest close enough together to be contained In the same long-shot...
...COWN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ERBECK, JR...
...This, time they speak softly and secretively as he explains how he's arranged to take her away again...
...As an aerial shot draws back from them lost at sea in their little boat, the camera picks up the swarming, iridescent highlights of the sun on the water...
...Perhaps because she sees where her bread is buttered, she has even encouraged this misconception...
...But now that vision...
...The scene in those shots is always lovely and tranquil, and the figures close together...
...Wertmuller is not a politician: she's a filmmaker, and she knows that what we see is what must ultimately matter in a movie...
...After nightfall, the mistress of the boat, Raffaela (Mariangela Melato), emerges from below decks into the brilliant, silvery backlighting of moonbeams bouncing off stainless fittings...
...Now it's his turn, since she must depend on him for survival, to get his licks in...
...And now as before, it is what we see, rather than what we hear, that we are compelled to believe...
...Lina Wertmuller's new film, Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, is no exception...
...And when they at last fetch up on a deserted island, they are enfolded by green foliage, bleached limestone and pearl gray twilights...
...Again and again, as, in those establishing shots at the beginning or that aerial shot of die dinghy, we see her characters from a great distance...
...When she suddenly jumps her camera off at a distance from her characters, it is in part to keep their ideological bickering in perspective- to show it as only a small hubbub in a very pleasing landscape...
...During the day the boat nuzzles into the blue grottos of the Mediterranean coast...
...This is why the film is funny...
...In ft penultimates scene, he calls her at the hotel where she has been re-united with her husband...
...Eventually, grudgingly, Gennarine's and Raffaela's loathing turns into love, but Gennarino is still too mis-trustful to be satisfied with that...
...At dusk it glides before an orange and blue sunset...
...To her the world is not as strident and disagreeable as it sounds in this film, but as beautiful and sensuous as it looks...
...The disparity between the sights and sounds of the film makes us choose continually between believing what we hear and believing what we see...
...They are enshrouded in the sort of photography whose colors are so rich they seem actually to fill the air between us and the landscape we are looking at...
...This, is unfortunate, especially since her popularity has been based on tills misconception that she has such trendy commitments...
...During the establishing shots at the very beginning of the film, before we even get close enough to make out who is speaking, we can hear Raffaela delivering a marathon diatribe against everything and everyone that isn't idle, feckless and fashionable like her...
...She is a rich bitch of the worst sort-the sort that flaunts it-and when she discovers that deckhand Gennarino is a Communist, she takes special delight in torturing him...
...When she comes to the phone he tells her he's calling from the gas station across the street and is looking right at her...
...He effects their rescue so that she will have to prove her love for him by con-turning it back in the civilized world...
...We no longer see them together and at a distance, arguing at the top of their voices...
...He makes her work for every morsel of food he provides, and slaps her around for good measure whenever he has the least excuse...
...The film begins on a sailboat, and Ms...
...The incongruity that Wertmuller creates here is one between the visual and aural scales of her film...
...Even when Raffaela and one of her sailors, Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), get separated from the boat while out in a dinghy, life on the water remains a luxurious, stunning sight...
...Extreme long shots show us Raffaela's party lolling on the deck of the sailboat, or the tiny figures of her and Gennarino traipsing across their island...
...Thus Wertmuller's film becomes in large measure a contradiction, or at least a conflict, between what we see and what we hear...
...Raffaela is squawking about something, or Gennarino is, or each is shouting at the other simultaneously...
...Wertmuller takes about every one of those opportunities she has to dazzle us with the scenery...
...At first she continues to browbeat and bully him, but once they get to the island he's had enough...
...The clown's shoes are too big and his hat too small, die punchline of the joke is either an overstatement or an understatement, swatting a fly is wanton but blasting it with a cannon is hilarious...
...Despite the distance from which we are watching, however, we hear the characters speak in these shots as if we were in their midst, and their dialogue is always pure discord...
...of them to which we have become accustomed is turned inside out...
...Politics is the great subject of debate ni her films, but what her characters have to say about politics is always just a lot of talk-a lot of hot air and bombast, More than once Raffaela makes fiery speeches defying Gennarino, and in the next cut Wertmuller gets a laugh by showing her doing precisely what she was just in veighing against so eloquently...
...Those who choose the former think Wertmuller is full of passionate politi-cal commitments to socialism or feminism or revolutionism or whatever...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 15
