Swept from the Sea

Last night I watched the haunting movie “Swept From the Sea” made from the 30-page story “Amy Foster” written by Polish-Ukrainian Joseph Conrad depicting life in the late 1800s. Yanko leaves his village in the Ukraine and takes a ship to America but the ship crashes on the rugged coast of Cornwall, England.

At first he is taken for a wild man when he is washed up from the sea, ragged, starving and not speaking a familiar language. The quiet, outcast Amy Foster brings him a hunk of bread and washes his face when the farmer locks him up. Her tenderness touches and calms him.

The story follows their progress, his in learning to speak English, hers in learning to trust and to love. The expressions Vincent Perez emotes shows the torment and frustration Conrad must have experienced when he went to England as a young man not knowing a word of English before he arrived.

The movie spotlights the sea as Conrad has written about it in his many novels and how he must have experienced it in his many sea journeys. Perez brings his own touch of the smoldering gruffness that he brought to his role of Oskar in “Bride of the Wind.”