Swept Away is an absorbing movie, it tells a story we get involved in and it's often very funny.

Wertmuller is everything Kubrick is not -- sloppy, incoherent, rambunctious, playful, perverse and every inch a film artist... Her lightness has the intoxication of pure afflatus.

Even as an ironic read, it is hard to stomach the film’s misogyny (notably in the portrayal of the wife to whom Gennarino returns), and its class and political critiques are muddled in favour of a survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

Swept Away is the kind of art movie that anyone can get a huge kick out of, whether or not old foreign films are your bag.