Castaway (1987)

A Disappointing Continuation

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Watched this as a Netflix streaming movie. Filmed in the Seychelles.It starts in London where an middle-aged man, nearing 50, with teenage sons at home, decides that he wants to spend a year on a tropical island with a younger women. There is a bit of mumbling in the dialog so he may have said and I missed it, but I never found out what he was going to do with his sons during this time.So he places an ad for a "wife" and is in the process of meeting the respondents one by one, until he meets Lucy and she seems to be just right. So he cancels the other interviews, he and Lucy start spending time together, sleeping together, and probably planning the details of their trip although it isn't obvious that they do so.When ready, they set off and once in Australia find that they must be married to cavort alone on the island, and somehow Lucy had decided she wanted to remain single, but they marry to avoid canceling.As we watch this story it seems that planning was not done very well. They don't really know what they will do with their time, and they don't seem particularly prepared for food, shelter, or invariable medical needs. Plus, she decides, once they are on the island alone, she spends most of her time nude but loses all her interest in sex, which creates its own new set of problems.Veteran actor Oliver Reed is the man, Gerald Kingsland. Amanda Donohoe as the woman Lucy Irvine, was about 23 and very lovely.While the movie is interesting from a character study, and just the idea of two relative strangers spending a year alone together on a small island with no conveniences, it doesn't flow very well and when it is all over doesn't particularly make sense. Except, perhaps, to show that even if you go half-way around the world, to an island, you still end up eventually doing and enjoying what you did back home. He stayed in Australia, she flew away, probably back to London.

The is one thing I remember this film for more than the story or even the two lead stars (which I knew too), and that is the nudity! Basically Gerald Kingsland (Oliver Reed) advertises in a London newspaper for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desert island, and he gets Lucy Irvine (Amanda Donohoe). A couple of meetings later, they are on their way, and most of the time, as I said, roaming around naked as they indulge in what the island has to offer, which is not much. It soon becomes clear it is not as idyllic as they would have thought, with both the island and their arguments creating tension, but they have to bare with it the full year. Also starring Georgina Hale as Sister Saint Margaret, Frances Barber as Sister Saint Winifred, Tony Rickards as Jason, Len Peihopa as Ronald, Todd Rippon as Rod, Virginia Hey as Janice, John Sessions as Man in Pub, Stephen Jenn as Shop Manager, Sorrell Johnson as Lara, Paul Reynolds as Mike Kingsland and Sean Hamilton as Geoffrey Kingsland. This is a very odd film for director Nicholas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Witched) to choose, and both Reed and Donohoe aren't very suitable, there isn't much to say about this film to persuade you to watch it, well, maybe seeing Donohoe naked, but that's it. Oliver Reed was number 78 on The 100 Greatest Movie Stars, and he was number 26 on The 50 Greatest British Actors. Adequate!

Island travelogue and would-be 'uninhibited' male-female relations get sprinkled with psychosexual melodrama here, as only filmmaker Nicolas Roeg could present it. An older Londoner (Oliver Reed) advertises for a female companion to spend a year with him on a deserted island; Amanda Donohoe answers--she's the kind of gal who whips off all her clothes the minute the boat docks. Based on Lucy Irvine's book, one gets the sense this plot could be more a fantasy for women than for men--after all, the headstrong lady seems to call most of the shots, while Reed does the deep contemplating (with most of his clothes on!). The initial set up of the story is fun, but once the couple gets to the island, the script becomes non-existent. Director Nicolas Roeg isn't interested in lush, romantic tiptoeing through the flora and fauna (and he probably didn't see "The Blue Lagoon" anyway), yet one cannot help but imagining these two as older Blue Lagooners for a more cynical age, caught up in a messy combination between that scenario and the more political "Swept Away". Alas, this "Castaway" seems made up of leftover parts. *1/2 from ****

A middle-aged misogynist letch harbours fantasies of groping a woman half his age who will double as a door mat and assume the role of a sexually submissive automaton on a desert Island and advertises for the same omitting everything except the woman part in this true-ish story based on Lucy Irving's account of year with this obnoxious, overweight behemoth. This is a gap year with a difference, in this case the gap between reality and the ignorant daydreams of a couple of selfish, moronic Londoners. If this introduction implies you should feel some sympathy for Irving then forget it. If Gerald Kingsland, as portrayed by Oliver Reed was as crass and obvious as one of those sex cards you find in phone boxes then Irving, as played by Amanda Donahoe is a priggish middle class suburbanite who tires of the grind of city living and facts of life like crime and Royal weddings and so imagines that she alone, despite having no idea how it might be done, will travel thousands of miles to be self-sufficient and uses Kingsland to make this a reality. Initially she's not going to let anything, even the facts, get in the way of this protracted venture to la-la land. She ignores the warning signs - Kingsland's obvious fear of female intelligence, the fact that he's had to advertise for a "wife" in the first place, his obvious interest in sex with a woman 20 years his junior and even, in a wonderful example of the will to ignorance, the way he contrives to spend all their money before they've left, forceing Irving to marry him in accordance with Australian immigration law. Some women might bale out at this stage and cut their losses but those sandy beaches are quite the lure and the two sad-sacks go anyway prompting 12 months of predictable implosion in which Kingsland angrily resents Irving's lack of sexual interest while she alone is astounded by his laziness, toe curling advances, crudity and total lack of survival instinct. In fact 9 months in and the two have virtually died from malnutrition. If Irving had hoped to spend a year bathing naked while Kingsland built the house and grew the food, she's as deluded as the old man who hoped to spend 12 months engaged in vigorous intercourse, pampered by his new wife in idyllic surroundings. This is a fascinating story but its impossible to feel anything but irritation at these two characters and Roeg does nothing to pull us toward either of them. He seems content to be a bit of letch himself, focusing on Donahoe's nakedness while mercifully sparing us shots of Reed's reed. Ultimately Irving's story confirms something we already knew, namely that Robinson Crusoe is a great story but it makes a lousy lifestyle choice for a mismatched couple from west London who would normally get no closer to the life of self-sufficiency than a visit to M and S. It wouldn't have taken us a year to figure it out either. Pity they had to come back.