MOVIE REVIEW : ‘CASTAWAY’ PUTS A ROMANTIC CLICHE INTO FOCUS

In “Castaway” (selected theaters), director Nicolas Roeg takes the ultimate romantic movie cliche--two lovers stranded for a year on a desert island--and gives it a series of savage twists. The experience turns idyllic on one side, threatening and mad on the other. Typically for Roeg, the story takes on a weird, multicolored shattered-glass clarity--like a kaleidoscope struck by a hammer.

It’s a sexy, stimulating, often brilliant film, with wild edges and dangerous poetry. Beneath the surface--the sunny, coral beaches and azure waters caught by cameraman Harvey Harrison--you can sense a deep, dark, sea-rhythmed heart beating away.

Roeg and writer Allan Scott start with a naturalistic base, the Tuin Island memoirs of Lucy Irvine (Amanda Donohoe) and Gerald Kingsland (Oliver Reed). In their story, reality smashes against any dreamily lewd preconceptions. The characters may imagine beach revels by a shimmering moonlit ocean, but in real life, sand scratches their backs, the sky spits and rages and the sea coughs up little monsters.

The actual stay on Tuin--a mile-long island in the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea--inspired two books: Kingsland’s “The Islander” and Irvine’s “Castaway.” And, unlike Robinson Crusoe’s sojourn or “Swept Away,” it was intentional. The middle-aged Kingsland planned it from the beginning as material for a book, even advertising in the London weekly Time Out for a youthful female companion.

Since it’s based on fact, “Castaway” can refreshingly skewer the whole great cliche of the desert-island romance: the notion that sex and love are all-conquering, that if you could just stay on that island, away from civilization’s blights, all would be well . In the beginning, Roeg shows London as a packed, nerve-racking hive, strung together on wires of media: a world where Marc Chagall prints hang over a TV spewing out news on terrorists--and where Gerald and Lucy are first visually linked by a movie about a failed marriage, “The Pumpkin Eater,” which they watch in separate, chaotically cluttered rooms. Against all this, the blue-white vistas of Tuin are a serene contrast. But civilization and its messes seem to stick to this couple like a burr.

Roeg, as usual, excels at catching the clashes of inner and outer reality and the mingled sensuousness and cruelty of sex. As in his and Scott’s previous collaboration, “Don’t Look Now,” the lyricism begins to curdle, gush or bleed. Those gorgeous island vistas make your mind soar and your skin crawl, and the hurricanes and droughts, sand flies and sickness--not to mention a couple of amiably randy visitors and some invading nuns--turn the paradise into a purgatory.

In life, Lucy never fell for Gerald, and her unwillingness to cohabit with him on Tuin was their major source of tension. In the film, Gerald, his macho and health withering, hobbles with embittered futility around their shabby campsite while Lucy, nude as a sunlit seal, does most of the heavy chores. When sex does ignite--pressed out of necessity rather than desire--it has an eerie, shrill edge. Gerald seems a forlorn john; Lucy’s squeals of “OK?” sound like the whelps of a panicky animal.

Amanda Donohoe, in her film acting debut, is a fine, tough Lucy. But even though the movie is based on Lucy’s memoir and though Roeg shifts constantly between viewpoints, it has a basically male-oriented slant. It’s Gerald--a great, hulking bear with wounded paws --who gets most of the sympathy. Oliver Reed is a strange actor, and his barrel-like physiognomy and menacing eyes often seem best suited for the gargoyle roles Ken Russell gives him. But here Reed gives a vulnerable, deeply human performance, one of the best of his career. As Gerald, he reminds you of an ersatz Hemingway with his pants down, besotted on mortality.

“Castaway” is the most outwardly lucid and simple of all Roeg’s films; sometimes it has an almost numinous shine. You hope those qualities will bring it the larger audience this superb film maker usually misses. Roeg creates such bizarre rhythms and poetic spaces, plays with time and perspective in such original ways that in the more conservative ‘80s his work seems an anachronism. But like many interesting artists, he’s an incessant embellisher and complicator: He loves to pack his images, collide them against each other in outrageous ways, move in lively, unpredictable directions.

The idea of filtering a feminist reminiscence through male eyes makes for a moving synthesis; at the end, when a sort of love appears, it’s the more poignant affection of fellow travelers who have suffered together and come to a kind of peace. “Castaway” (MPAA rated R for sex, language and nudity) is, among other things, a microcosmic and often burningly honest portrayal of some modern marriages--with all their compromises, false starts and doomed conjugations. This is a wedlock without organ chords and fiery sunsets; with all of love’s traps, shocks and accidental blessings.

‘CASTAWAY’ A Cannon Screen Entertainment/United British Artists presentation. Producer Rick McCallum. Director Nicolas Roeg. Script Allan Scott. Camera Harvey Harrison. Music Stanley Myers. Editor Tony Lawson. Production design Andrew Sanders. With Oliver Reed, Amanda Donohoe, Tony Rickards, Todd Rippon.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).