Is swooning still fashionable?

It seems that in Jane Austen’s day love used to have a much more debilitating
effect on the body. Oh of course I’ve been love’s little fool many times and my body has been subject to all kinds of minor mishaps: shaky voice upon meeting with a Him, inundated with stomach-butterflies when I hear the rustle of my phone in my pocket, tear it open – will it be Him?

But it seems that those vast distances that had to be covered by carriage in order to be reunited with a beloved were much more conducive to swooning than the time it takes for someone to respond to a text. Maybe I'm just not looking around enough - but do people still swoon?

Ingrid Bergman was a highly skilled swooner.

After watching her in Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli I have reconsidered tailored pants as a viable `around the house’ option. She also wears her nose with a great deal of finesse but despite the promise of the dvd cover she doesn’t swoon very much in this film.

Here we find her in a displaced person’s camp after the second world war when
everyone wants to get away from Europe and go somewhere starting with `A': Australia,
Argentina, Anywhere but Europe. Her application to go to Argentina is turned down, so when
a boyish Italian who has just been un-soldiered asks her through the camp’s barbed wire
fence if she wants to marry him and see his big volcano, she agrees, out of desperation
more than anything else.

It turns out his big volcano is on the island of Stromboli and so Ingrid,
with her well cut voice and modern ideas, finds herself martini-less and
on a desolate island that has been deserted by anyone who could could get the hell out of there. The few inhabitants include a pack of conservative old women who grimace at her because she is different, a husband who `doesn’t understand', and a volcano that keeps spitting hot lava at her.

Ingrid makes some tiny efforts to understand her husband - once she goes to see him on his fishing boat - but this is merely a ploy by the filmmaker to show us a spectacular and detailed tuna fishing scene - and doesn't succeed in bringing them any closer together.

In desperation Ingrid tries to seduce the local priest, but much to our disappointment he resists her impressive lechery and so, after splashing around in the sea a bit with the lighthousekeeper she convinces him to give her enough money to escape from her husband/the island.

The problem is that in order to do this she has to pass the furious volcano, which seems to be even less fond of her than the other inhabitants of the island. In the final scene we are left with an anguished Ingrid crying out to god, covered in volcano dust and encircled by vultures. I guess we could say that the volcano is phallic society preventing a woman from having a room of her own, or perhaps its a symbol of her own personal explosion. We certainly hope it isn't meant to be divine retribution for not wanting to hang out on an island without books for the rest of her life.

One of the main problems with this film is that they never showed anyone eating. Eating is such an important part of life and it just gets creepy when no one eats. I thought it was supposed to be neo-realist. Also there wasn't enough swooning. People should swoon more.