This new "Swept Away" is more sentimental, I'm afraid, and the two castaways fall into a more conventional form of love. I didn't believe it for a moment. They have nothing in common, but worse still, neither one has any conversation. They don't say a single interesting thing. That they have sex because they are stranded on the island I can believe. That they are not sleeping in separate caves by the time they are rescued I do not.
The problem with the Madonna character is that she starts out so hateful that she can never really turn it around. We dislike her intensely and thoroughly, and when she gets to the island we don't believe she had learned a lesson, or turned nice--we believe she is behaving with this man as she does with all men, in the way best designed to get her what she wants. As for the sailor, does he really love her, as he says in that demeaning and pitiful speech toward the end of the film? What is there to love? They shared some interesting times together, but their minds never met.
The ending is particularly unsatisfactory, depending as it does on contrived irony that avoids all of the emotional issues on the table. If I have come this far with these two drips, and sailed with them, and been shipwrecked with them, and listened to their tiresome conversations, I demand that they arrive at some conclusion more rewarding than a misunderstanding based upon a misdelivered letter. This story was about something when Wertmuller directed it, but now it's not about anything at all. It's lost the politics and the social observation and become just another situation romance about a couple of saps stuck in an inarticulate screenplay.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46srp6opGKuuK3YZmlpaGI%3D