So I have watched two Italian movies in the past couple of weeks that both treat gender and sexuality in starkly different ways, though they were both made in 1974 and both were directed by women, ironically.
Lisa Wertmuller's film
Swept Away is a story about an upper-class woman and her lower-class servant getting stranded on a deserted island together, where they experience a switching of dominant/submissive roles in both class and gender constructs. Rafaella is haughty, self-indulgent and ignorant of the ways in which other people in the world are oppressed. Gennarino is a Communist from South Italy who takes the opportunity to teach Rafaella her place and a lesson in humility, as personal vengeance against the oppressions of the upper classes of North Italy. They fall in love, or so Wertmuller would have the audience believe, but in the end when they return to civilization, Rafaella abandons Gennarino to rejoin her privileged world.
Turning this perception of the good class/bad class on its head is Wertmuller's portrayal of traditional gender roles on the island. This Wertmuller makes no attempt at complicating in the least. Rafaella?s character does not represent a changing self-consciousness in the status of women but a reversion of such. Yes, she verbally assaults Gennarino before and during their stay on the island, but Gennarino eventually resorts to physical and sexual violence in order to teach Rafaella not only the significance of her class status but also her place as a woman. This attitude is further evidenced by Gennarino's similar treatment of his wife upon their return from the island. Throughout the film, it tries to convince the audience that not only does Rafaella submit to physical, emotional and sexual abuse to survive but that she enjoys it, so infatuated is she with Gennarino. Though it is revealed in the end that Rafaella feigned this enamoredness, she endured far more than what was necessary for her to survive. Therefore I cannot find any evidence of a progression of women's status in this film, only a regression of feminist values. Gender violence cannot be justified as an allegory for class and political revolt. Constructs of gender cannot be analyzed separately from those of class, and this film attempts to do that by complicating one without doing the same to the other.
Touching on similar themes but in completely different ways is Liliana Cavani's controversial film
The Night Porter. It's controversial because it's a love story between a Nazi officer in a concentration camp and one of its Jewish prisoners and their (completely consensual) sadomasochistic relationship (yikes). Yet somehow, Cavani seems to pull it off without being offensive, because they meet again in 1957 and renew their relationship. The way in which it is different from
Swept Away in its treatment of the S&M relationship is that the couple does not stay in prescribed gender roles. Each shows dominant and submissive aspects, masculine and feminine, completely turning the gender construct on its head. The genuine love story in a war-torn setting combined with the S&M aspects basically make it a
Casablanca meets
Secretary kind of film. I'm not trying to compare the films, though I highly recommend both of them. The film does not resort to physical violence of one gender using force to control the other, as is evident in
Swept Away. While Lucia (the Jewish woman) seems completely the submissive or the "bottom," (in one scene he ties her down with a chain), Max (the former Nazi) is completely at her feet, submitting to her every whim even while they play their parts. In this way gender roles are reversed and perverted, with the feminized man and the butch woman, so to speak: Lucia is stoic and defiant, as a man is expected to be, while Max is emotional, temperamental and entreating toward Lucia, which are traditionally "feminine" traits. There are some very touching scenes - such as when you discover that Lucia kept a dress that Max had given her in the camp for 15 years. In addition to gender, there is also major threads of homoeroticism running through the film, suggesting that Max had an affair (whether physical or emotional) with a male Nazi dancer before he met Lucia. Practically every scene is dripping with sexuality, even objectification, while still maintaining its human aspects.
As you can probably tell, I loved
The Night Porter and basically loathed
Swept Away. If both involve sadistic and masochistic elements, what is the difference between them? In Swept Away, violence against women is used as revenge, control, and to show dominance of men over women. In The Night Porter, there is physical violence sometimes used, yet there is a cyclical nature to who is dominant and who is submissive and rejects gender structures. There are also queer aspects of The Night Porter in which norms of morality are questioned, which is probably why it is so controversial. Swept Away, despite its desperation to shock and arouse with its sexual scenes, merely serves the dominant heterosexist and misogynist agenda that people are so used to.
