On Screen
AUFHAUSER, MARCIA CAVELL
On Screen WOMEN ADRIFT BY MARCIA CAVELL AUFHAUSER IN The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir tells us that as an old man, Victor Hugo was daunted in his pursuit of the female body neither by the...
...For while Raffaella undergoes a transformation (she becomes more beautiful, more sensual, even the rasp in her voice changes into a loving growl), Gennarino remains as foolish, and as foolishly ideological, as ever...
...By contrast, Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, a film about love and some other things as well, is visually beautiful, often very funny, full of fantasies gratified, and tremendous fun...
...One can certainly read the movie this way, but the interpretation doesn't quite fit...
...The movie opens in Nova Scotia, where she has pursued a young English lieutenant who made love to her in Guernsey, but to whom—it is clear at the start —she was merely a casual affair...
...You still think a man's first duty is to his dignity," he chides...
...Again and again in the film she dreams it is she who is drowning...
...Is this the revolution we are to root for—the rise of the lower class and the triumph of sexism...
...On board a group of wealthy Italians argue idly but waspishly about Communism...
...Still, Adele never seems simply a case study...
...By the end, however, she has come undone, having turned into a dishevelled madwoman who fancies herself married to a man now married to another...
...Raffaella insists on iced wine ("Stalin liked his iced too," she remarks), sends Gennarino back to the galley for fresh, not reheated coffee, complains that the crew stinks, and grumbles that the spaghetti is not al dento ("While awaiting the revolution we can at least have our spaghetti the way we like it...
...It is also madly muddled and, so, bound to enrage many people...
...I cannot give my body without my soul...
...That she loves him more than she loves her husband...
...If Adele's commitment to her emotions makes her a self-dramatizing child of the Romantic movement, her unwillingness to divide herself into flesh and spirit commands our respect...
...Dut such revenge is too simple...
...the film is in color, but the hues are always dark...
...Nothing is vulgar in love," he says, echoing Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper...
...So much for machismo...
...Adele—played superbly by Isabelle Adjani—was Hugo's younger daughter, a talented girl who wrote music...
...He wants to know the truth: Is the real Raffaella the one who loves him now, or the fancy one...
...Even more remarkable, this movie about passion is itself consistently ascetic: Our attention is always on Adele, a woman whose seriousness never breaks pace...
...Sodomize me," she sweetly begs Gennarino...
...A pleasure in whoring, therefore, seems to have been a matter of choice for him rather than faute de mieux—a choice that, at the age of 76, the victim of a slight stroke, he refused to give up even when his doctor advised him it might be a question of survival...
...That satisfied expression on her face wasn't there on the yacht," he mutters to himself contentedly...
...Of her life before the movie begins (she is 20), we learn only that she had an older sister who drowned one week after her wedding (and whose husband died attempting to save her...
...But that answer is clear...
...his friend asks...
...Women are meant to serve men," Gennarino declares, and Raffaella tells him that he is the natural man, man as he was before things changed...
...Now keep me...
...Adele confides in her journal: "My sisters suffer in bordellos and in marriage...
...As a result, the movie more resembles The Wild Child than The Soft Skin or Stolen Kisses...
...Some system...
...One can imagine some of the things an impressionable and sensitive daughter of such an enormously seductive figure may have felt: how overwhelmed she must have been by his irresistable power, how jealous of his mistresses, who were young enough to be her sisters, how angry in her identification with her sorry mother...
...he's a homesick sentimental tenor in the body of a basso, and through him Wertmuller manages to make affectionate fun of the Italian Communist party and of Italy (famous arias are the sound-track's ironic commentary on a number of crucial passages in the film...
...Though I respect its integrity, The Story of Adele H. lacks the delight, the irony, the sheer joy in imagery that typically mark Truffaut's films...
...Until then, we can found all the new societies we want, but Crusoe will still have Friday, black or female...
...the rhythm is slow, uninterrupted by surprise or moments of pleasure...
...Gennarino still thinks his first duty is to his dignity, which may be why he ultimately loses Raffaella: She is less important to him than the conquest she symbolizes...
...At night, Raffaella's husband goes to bed early, leaving her to a poker game and their guests...
...Confronted with the problem of survival, Gennarino and Raffaella reverse roles...
...She washes his clothes, waits while he eats, serves him cold water from the spring, and furiously submits to his tyrannical rule...
...Their motor conks out and they drift for three days and nights, but Raffaella keeps going: She complains that her cigarettes are wet, that the fish Gennarino has managed to catch with considerable effort is disgusting, that it is no surprise they are in this fix since he obviously knows nothing about motors, boats, navigation, or—she balefully implies—being a man...
...so did the well-known beauty Judith Gautier...
...Among many others, Sarah Bernhardt, then young and herself a celebrity, offered herself...
...But then class is more important to him than to her...
...Even rape isn't profound enough...
...the privileges of class fall away...
...Thus, the battle lines are drawn: women against men, passengers against crew, capitalists against Communists, fair against dark, Raffaella against Gennarino...
...You are already a slave," he tells her...
...Love is my religion...
...Yet what is he trying to prove, and why...
...and the person most offended by her anti-Communist barbs is Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), the sexiest, swarthiest member of the crew...
...Wert-muller's Eden apparently includes women's subjugation, and there are indications that female masochism is not only the way things are in a disordered society but the way things ought to be...
...If Wertmuller has a serious point to make, it's that the revolution won't come before men have gotten past their pride and their need for power...
...Finally, they reach a deserted island and we are ready for Raffaella's comeuppance...
...Raffaella (Mariangela Melato), dressed to the teeth in a bikini, bleached and blond in a metallically attractive way, berates her fellow travelers, whose reading of Unita feeds her greedy ire...
...Drink and gamble...
...In The Story of Adele H.—a reconstruction of the life of one of Hugo's daughters from her moving journal—Francois Truffaut gives us reason to make such speculations, although he is too detached to make them himself...
...On Screen WOMEN ADRIFT BY MARCIA CAVELL AUFHAUSER IN The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir tells us that as an old man, Victor Hugo was daunted in his pursuit of the female body neither by the decrepitude of his own, nor by the misery of his wife, Juliet...
...You bourgeois invented that...
...Adele's own story is without honor or fruition...
...The movie announces her as a ball-breaking bitch with a voice like shredded metal, a walking, if simple-minded testament to the evils of idleness...
...To her lover she writes, "I gave myself to you...
...Truffaut's subject in most of his films is passion, which he usually treats in a personal and intimate way...
...But his stance here is studious and historical...
...Raffaella and Gennarino's unusual destiny begins late one afternoon when she demands to be taken in the dinghy for a swim, in spite of his warning that the tide is against them and it will soon be dark...
...Yet we like Gennarino in spite of his inconsistencies—for the sad songs he sings, for the way his eyes careen when he peeks at the bare breasts lined up on deck in the sun, for the little-boy shuffle he does when Raffaella catches him looking longingly at her...
...He wants the subjection of her soul as well as her body...
...When a boat eventually appears on the horizon, Gennarino insists on their allowing themselves to be rescued...
...He doesn't understand the big word, and as she explains it to him, she apologizes for sounding vulgar...
...But for what else...
...Her sister's death had both the horror and the sweetness of a jealous woman's revenge...
...He never gets past his need for power, and the pleasure he takes in her seems to be more the pleasure of having defeated her husband than of seeing her happy...
...A pleasure yacht glides across a silent Mediterranean...
...What is shown is the progress of a disease...
...And since he was a famous man, probably in many ways a very attractive one, Hugo found his compliments returned...
...What do you do when your wife goes to bed...
...Obediently, she does, and most of the rest of the movie is an island idyll, a Lawrencian tale with Raffaella as the natural, eroticized woman who knows her place at the end of a phallus...
...Truffaut maintains our sympathy for her at the same time that he observes her folie...
...On deck, Gennarino says to his friend: "If my wife did that, I'd kick her ass straight to bed...
...Gennarino splutters under Raf-faella's insults and is reminded by his captain that the two of them are only in it for the money...
...The film is a study of passion spinning free—of its immoderate-ness, its total self-preoccupation, its inclination toward destruction...
...You've got to become the slave of love...
...The same system,' the friend quips...
...and that Adele was envious of her sister, of the marriage, of the way her parents treated the wedding dress as a kind of relic, of the husband's devotion...
...That she loves him for himself alone...
...That she will love him in the trappings of his class...
...Gennarino has the face of a scruffy Pagliacci...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
