Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August
Lina Wetmüller, 1974
First woman to be ever nominated for an Academy Award, Lina Wetmüller was born in Rome
in August 1928 and died at the age of 93 in 2021. She wrote and directed around 30 movies
over nearly five decades, challenging audiences with her incendiary tales of anarchy,
fascism, crime and the battle between the sexes.
She graduated from Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica Silvio D'Amico in 1951 and
spent the most part of the 50s directing theatre and puppet shows, where she learnt that
what brought people in was the perfect amount of dramatic tension and laughter.
She then moved into cinema thanks to a schoolmate, whose husband was noneother than
Marcello Mastroianni – then a rising star working on Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 . She soon
became one of Fellini’s many assistants.
Working with Fellini gave Lina the confidence to start making her own films, convincing her
that what mattered the most was being able to clearly tell stories – rather than directing them
to perfection.
She directed her first film in 1963, The Basilisks – paying homage to Fellini’s I Vitelloni, but
spinning Fellini’s romantic view of perpetual adolescence with a razor wire. She soon started
establishing herself as a director telling about Italy as a nation struggling economically and
socially with post-war modernization, marked by stark differences between the North and the
South, country and cities, the working class and the industrial bourgeoisie.
And this is precisely what we see in Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of
August – the film that affirmed Wetmüller’s international success. And no, this is not the work
she features in the Guinness Book of World Records for as the film with the longest title ever
– just in case you were wondering.
Shot in 1974, this film stars Wetmüller’s iconic duo Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo
Giannini as Raffaella and Gennarino – a rich, spoiled, bourgeois woman from Northern Italy
and a Communist Sicilian sailor with clear sexist views of women. We see Raffaella giving
orders, criticising and despising him for his smell and his overcooked pasta and Gennarino
obeying through gritted teeth while their yacht sails in the blue Sardinian sea.
However, such social dynamics are reversed when the two are suddenly stranded on a
desert island.
As you’ll see, Wetmüller uses an extreme language to depict Raffaella and Gennarino’s
relationship, leading film critic Anthony Kaufman to describe it as “possibly the most
outrageously misogynist film ever made by a woman”.
Gennarino violently kicks, slaps and uses strong names against her – and there is no doubt
this is something most viewers would feel uncomfortable with. But what Wetmüller is aiming
to do here is playing with the pastoral myth of the state of nature, giving us food for thought
about how human beings behave and desire when freed from established social norms.
The relationship between Raffaella and Gennarino can be also seen as an allegory of the
conflicts between exploited and exploiting class. This film is more about the social roles
these characters play and the classes they embody, rather than their sexual identities and,
as Wetmüller herself said, the gender of the two characters could be switched without
undermining the allegory.
I will leave it to you to judge if the language and allegory used by Wetmüller has stood the
passing of time, but I have no doubt it will leave you with lots to take in. Enjoy the film!
Rachele Parietti