365 Dni [365 Days] (2020)
(Netflix Streaming, October 2021) As I’ve mentioned before, a good chunk of my movie viewing is not by choice—in an effort to diversify my film horizons, I rely on a variety of semi-automated lists. I often barely glance at the log-line before diving cold into those picks. As a result, I see… everything and anything. After a perfunctory prologue that could have fit in any gangster film, the real nature of 365 Days emerges five minutes into the film, with a graphic fellatio for the male protagonist intercut with the female lead pleasuring herself with a vibrating instrument. That should be a signal that we’re not in the usual genres here, and before long the frank European nature of the film becomes even more perverse, as our male lead (a mafia boss) abducts a woman glimpsed a few years earlier and announces his intention to lock her up for a year in the hope that she’ll fall in love and willingly give herself up to him. Numerous soft-core sex scenes follow (with plenty of thrusting and nudity, albeit avoiding erect phalluses by millimetre-precise positioning of the camera) in between a narrative designed to present erotic fantasies. Clearly patterned after the Fifty Shades of Gray series in many ways, 365 Days is at once reprehensible and hilariously blunt in its intentions. Almost entirely reliant on the astonishing good looks of Anna-Maria Sieklucka and Michele Morrone, the film is designed to offer equal-opportunity fantasy fuel for all audiences—a lusty, rich, bad-boy male protagonist, a shy-but-wild-spirited and naked female lead, and enough opportunities for semi-consensual erotic episodes to push the envelope. It doesn’t hold much back and that’s part of the charm—as much as “the boat scene” is fit to inspire laughter, it’s also quite a bit beyond anything Hollywood has done in ages. There’s a bit of a weird turn in the film’s last third (with a heroine inexplicably downgrading her looks), but the cliffhanger ending fools no one and clearly announces that there’s more to follow. But the fun of 365 Days really began once I took a look at the reviews, where very high viewership numbers (for Netflix, but also in IMDB voting totals) had to be measured against abysmal critical ratings and half a dozen Razzie nominations, including “worst movie of the year.” Now, I have plenty of objections to the Razzies (which in no way even touch the bottom of the barrel of moviemaking), but the harsh critical reaction to a sexually charged film had me thinking about how contemporary movie reviewers are probably not very well equipped to handle the kind of film that is 365 Days. Let’s agree that, in reality, sexual relationships must be (as the expression goes) safe, sane and consensual. Fantasies, on the other hand, are another matter—and I’m not sure that the current zeitgeist is ready to accept that you can have wild fantasies without necessarily promoting their real-life equivalent. Yes, it’s absolutely reprehensible that 365 Days would make a romantic hero out of a murderous crime boss who takes what (and who) he wants. But that’s the nature of the fantasy—yet I can understand that no one wants to be seen condoning that aberrant behaviour. This places mainstream movie reviewers in a tough spot: if you want to talk about the social implications of the film, you can’t end up meeting it at the level it was made for. Meanwhile, if reviewers talk about its effectiveness as fantasy (and 365 Days does plays with big guns of sexual temptation), who knows what people will think of the reviewers? It’s a no-win situation. So here’s my prediction: 365 Days has been such a viewership success for Netflix that the sequels (based on the books) have already been announced. Those sequels will be widely seen and critically reviled. In a few decades, perhaps once society accepts the difference between reality and fantasy, we’ll get a reappraisal that may get what the films were going for. In the meantime, I can guarantee you that there’s nothing else in the Netflix catalogue that gets close to 365 Days, and that in many ways it’s far bolder than the Fifty Shades of Gray series. I’ll let you figure out the rest in the privacy of your own mind.