What marvelous Italian sensibility! Italians have to be muted for drama, but give them comedy and they soar, it's who they are, who we are in general down South and all over the Mediterranean - boisterous, frivolous, yelling past each other out of some need to stay afloat, lest the silence bogs us down.
The allegory is of course as obvious as the characters, a shrill rich wife and a grumbling sailor, a communist we're told, on board her yacht during a cruise get stranded in a deserted island. Of course the dynamics shift - we see how easy and quick it is for him to become a tyrant now that he has the upper hand, how degrading for her to be ordered about. But then sex enters the picture and that changes everything; she's beaten around, almost raped and comes to love the submission.
As thin as the politics may be, so much more subversive when it becomes sexual. Rape fantasies are common in men and women alike, no reason to hide, and nothing peculiar about it - sex is after all in a primal way about the swap of power. But here just as about the fantasy is about to be consummated, at the peak of sexual paroxysm, this is the moment the filmmaker chose to have the man pull back and be revealed a delusional fool - she must cherish him as her god and so on.
The question that looms, a deep deep one, is was it the island? Or is it civilization that obscures? Which of the two shows their true self? Eventually they bond as lovers, but that is based on everything else we've seen. Do the limits imposed by being seen and known in public lead into delusions of self? Or does uninhibited freedom? Was it true love or was it a simple desire that found no limits to run up against? Who's to make all these impositions of truth anyway?
And we have to counterpoint all this against the richness of how they hold themselves in each other's eyes, some of the most expressive eyes in film - it's perfectly cast anyway, but the eyeplay between the two is marvelous, starting from that moment they share on the deck one night.
So this is fascinating stuff, about limits of self, about a slippery passion and having no logical truth that can explain beyond it, the only thing it asks is that you don't be moral about it. I can only imagine it better in Pasolini's hands, this lover of textures and breezes of air.
