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Castaway
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (27th March 2025). |
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The Film
 "40+" Gerald Kingsland (Women in Love's Oliver Reed) places an ad in the lonely hearts column looking for a "wife" with which to spend a year on a tropical island. The ad elicits the interest of Inland Revenue office worker Lucy Irvine (The Lair of the White Worm's Amanda Donohoe). Unattached with only the company of lovelorn divorcee flatmate Lara (I Capture the Castle's Sorel Johnson), Lucy yearns for adventure, but she and Gerald find that it is not so easy to get stranded on a desert island in the present day as the Queensland government will not let them immigrate to the Torres Straits island of Tuin without being married but it is too late to pull out as they have funded their preparations with the advance from a book deal that neither can afford to pay back. Lucy reluctantly agrees to the union and they land on the island where soon their different ideas of their adventure which violently clash as supplies run low, crops fail to grow, and a torrential hurricane further ravages the undernourished pair who may only be able to cling to one another in death. Based on the memoir by Irvine, Castaway is prime Nicolas Roeg material beyond the surface similarities to Walkabout in the tumultuous psychological breaking down and reconfiguration of individual identity realized on the physical level as a battle of the sexes explored in the likes of Bad Timing and Full Body Massage. Whereas Irvine's book begins with their arrival on the island, the film starts with Lucy and Gerald in London before they meet, but Roeg and regular screenwriter Alan Scott (Don't Look Now) are less interested in explaining how they got there than in conveying their inner loneliness even as Gerald has shared custody with his two teenage sons and is popular with kids as a swimming instructor while Lucy also seems popular with her co-workers even after hours, with a running television news commentary of British and world events of 1981 delivered by the likes of Gordon Honeycombe. Although Gerald immediately comes across as boorish at dinner – seemingly equating his ideal "wife" with Friday in "Robinson Crusoe" (a slave, Lucy points out) – he does have a seeming self-deprecating charm while Lucy herself seems game for a challenge rather than put off. The film gets the "will they or won't they" out of the way quickly as more of an icebreaker to the domestic strife that marks their subsequent relationship after they tie the knot. Both characters embody certain contradictory attitudes, with Lucy both wanting to be stripped and transformed by the most primitive notions of survival – aside from her early concern about basics like estimating how to ration out their provisions – and yet she is also the one that wants to probe Gerald's mind with questions. Gerald seems to indeed be a Robinson Crusoe wanting to conquer and bend nature to his will but, as Lucy gradually discovers, his "gimme a good beer, a good beer, and I'm happy sort of chap," is a front to his secret inner world as he becomes defensive even to a question from Lucy as broad as "what do you think about when you do ordinary things, boring things?" As lesions impede his walking, he becomes lazier and turns more inward, frustrating Lucy who nevertheless as his "wife" feels the need to defend him to the island's visitors. In the aftermath of their battle with the elements, he thrives among the tribe of the neighboring island while Lucy feels like their dream has been diluted, accusing him of turning their shelter into a suburb and "All that's left is frozen and salted chicken!" Gerald's last line as he bids her farewell, remaining behind and throwing into question his relationship with his children left behind in London, is "Be kind to my mistakes" – quoted in Kate Bush's main title song, and perhaps Irvine or Roeg and Scott may have been in the sense that his repeated retorts of "If we had sex, I wouldn't…" seems less like a sincere belief on his part and just a means of deflection (it feels like they have a lot less sex in Irvine's memoir than in the film so his frustration is more of a battle of will than physical urge). The photography of Harvey Harrison – who would also shoot Roeg's segment of Aria and his most mainstream, biggest budget studio effort The Witches – gives the film a slicker look that flatters the actors and turns the island into a picturesque backdrop rather than a character, but Roeg and his regular author Tony Lawson also make less use of the associative editing techniques he has come to be identified with from his directorial co-debut with Donald Cammell Performance while Stanley Myers and his future award-winning protege Hans Zimmer (who would be co-credited with Myers on subsequent projects) create an ethereal instrumental/electronic score rather than relying on the usual exoticism associated with desert island escapism, seeming like more of a transitional film than Eureka in Roeg's career towards works like Cold Heaven and his British and American television movies that made up most of his subsequent career until his return to features with his final film Puffball. The supporting cast includes Virginia Hey (The Living Daylights), Georgina Hale (Mahler), and Frances Barber (Photographic Fairies). 
Video
Released theatrically in the U.S. by Cannon and the U.K. by Columbia-Canon-Warner, Castaway was released on both sides of the Atlantic on VHS by Warner Bros. Through separate video distribution deals, the remnants of the U.S. deal possibly being the reason the film has not been released on DVD or Blu-ray until now – apart from Germany as a letterboxed, non-anamorphic DVD from an older master – with MGM possibly only having streaming rights stateside while being able to license physical media rights in the U.K. to 88 Films whose 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 4K scan of the original 35mm interpositive that cannot help but blow everything that came before it out of the water from the texture of the coarse paper on which Gerald writes his Lonely Hearts column ad to the gradual changes in the leads' pallor as hunger and undernourishment set in. The island settings evince more rocky and muddy textures as well as greater gradations of greenery. 
Audio
The English LPCM 2.0 rendering of the Dolby Stereo soundtrack makes itself known from the start with the Kate Bush piece and makes use of the surrounds in the London scenes for crowd ambiance while the underscoring of news reports in some scenes is also more intelligible in the front channels. On the island, there is some nice, subtle ambiance before the climactic storm which underlines the dialogue and recedes when exchanges become more intense. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by two new commentaries. The first is with audio commentary by Film Historians Eugenio Ercolani, Troy Howarth, and Nathaniel Thompson in which they make a case that the film is more than "minor Roeg" while also coming after his string of consistent hits, the arthouse side of Cannon's output and the peak year of 1986 when they produced more than forty films including this one. They also provide background on the real-life Kingsland who was a sex magazine editor and writer – his book on the experience "The Islander" was overshadowed by Irvine's book but they remained friends until his death – and had actually done two test runs with other women before Irvine and repeated the experience at least five more times, describing himself as "the sex pest of the South Pacific" and the comparatively more mild characterization in the film (noting that the film was based on Irvine's book and she approved the changes but also that it drew from Kingsland's book as well). Ercolani, whose London Film Academy 16mm short was inspired by Roeg and viewed by him, also reveals that Roeg was ambivalent about the film due to the script and the "fifty-percent right, fifty-percent wrong" casting, and also notes the more linear editing of the film. Next up is an audio commentary by film journalist David Flint who also fees the need to offer up a "defense" of the film and goes into more detail about the film's depiction of London, the background noise of the news reports, the parallel stories of the two protagonists' city lives, as well as the state of British filmmaking in the eighties and its effects on the careers of Reed, Donohoe, and Roeg – along with his colleague Ken Russell whose late eighties/nineties career also took a turn towards smaller and more offbeat projects as they were both becoming incompatible with the British film industry turn to social realism and Hollywood's increasing homogeneity. He also provides an explanation for the unbilled cameo of Richard Johnson (The Haunting) who was executive producer as part of a company formed with fellow actors Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, and Maggie Smith.  The disc also includes "Harvey Harrison on Castaway" (31:34) in which the cinematographer reveals that he and Roeg both worked together as cameramen and directors in the same commercial company but did not collaborate on a film until Castaway. He reveals that the production was delayed by the government of the Cook Islands turning down the film due to the nudity and finding a new location in the Seychelles where Harrison was from, contending with the budget – the Panaflex and Arriflex cameras were donated by Panavision – specifics about lighting the film's locations as day-for-night and not being able to afford wind machines for the hurricane so they built the set at the end of an airstrip. He also provides some anecdotes about working with Reed and Donohoe, including one rude one about being cramped up in a tent with the naked actors, Roeg, and operator Gordon Hayman (Dune) for a sex scene. The disc also includes the theatrical trailer (2:07) and still gallery (3:20). 
Packaging
The first pressing is presented in a limited double-walled slipcase featuring new artwork by Sean Longmore and includes replica production notes.
Overall
Long dismissed as "minor Roeg", Castaway's subject matter is actually prime Roeg material coming at a transitional period between his string of consistent hits and his more offbeat television and rarer theatrical work to come.
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