With the reckoning on how to portray male-female relationships in the wake of #MeToo, a film like 365 Days could, of course, never get made in the U.S.–world capital of enforcing political correctness despite itself still feeling all the same things it suppresses undercover. Things that brim to the surface in other more destructive ways eventually. Compared, inaccurately to Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie franchise based on the book that came out just before #MeToo could cause too many eyebrow raises about its nature, 365 Days is more Beauty and the Beast meets Pretty Woman (back when it was a script called $3,000) in terms of themes and plot, yet draws the comparison to E.L. James’ erotic-by-Midwestern-housewife-standards books because of its often sadomasochistic sex scenes centered on withholding and delayed pleasure.
Co-directed by Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes (so there you have it, not just a man behind the helm of what’s being called one big male-centric “rape fantasy”), 365 Days is also based on a trilogy of the same name by Polish author Blanka Lipińska–after all, the cosmetologist-turned-author admitted she was inspired by James to write her own erotic saga, also spurred by a trip she took to Sicily. And yes, we’re certainly not in banal, sexless Seattle anymore, but instead the picturesque Mediterranean shores of Sicily. It is here that Laura Biel (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) is on holiday with her goonish boyfriend, Martin (Mateusz Łasowski), in celebration of her twenty-ninth birthday. There with her best friend, Olga (Magdalena Lamparska), Laura admits that she knows she’s low on Martin’s list of priorities, something beneath that statement suggesting that she’s not sure if she should settle just because she’s getting older. The decision on that front is soon made for her by Don Massimo Torricelli (Michele Morrone, who also offers a few of the songs on the soundtrack, for added cheesy flair).
Little did Laura know at the beginning of the movie, which takes place five years before the present, he would catch sight of her on the beach just before his father was shot in front of his very eyes, sending him on an obsessive search for her after he goes unconscious from taking the bullet as well, hallucinating her face hovering above him, as she was the last woman he saw while staring at her through his binoculars from their perch on a castle-looking structure in Lampedusa. The dialogue just before consisting of his father warning, “Oh my son, you have to be careful. Beautiful women are heaven for the eyes and hell for the soul.” Massimo one-ups the maschilista talk with, “And purgatory for the wallet.” This brief exchange regarding heaven and hell presages a certain false analogy regarding Massimo’s relationship with Laura being not unlike the one between Zeus and Typhon (eventually trapped by Zeus beneath Mount Etna a.k.a. Tartarus).
From our brief encounter with Massimo’s father, the erstwhile head of his crime family, we’re made to have some sort of sympathy for the patriarch and the values he’s instilled within his son: namely, don’t traffic minors for sex slavery. So yeah, Massimo isn’t purely “evil” as a result of his criminal activities, trying his best to bring in morality where he can. One might even say that’s what all humans try their best to do in paving the road to hell with good intentions. As for Laura, she actually has a job of her own back in Poland, serving as a high-level executive for a hotel company. Apart from this fact, all we really know about her is that her sex life leaves something to be desired, as evidenced by the cross-cut scene of her masturbating after Martin rebuffs her advances while Massimo gets a semi-consensual blow job on his private jet (indeed, Massimo is a big fan of the blow job, as we’ll see throughout–symbolic, to be sure).
Thus far, we’ve seen their lives intercut before finally colliding back in Sicily. What we can tell of both of them is that they’re stubborn personalities determined to get what they want, tending to explode with rage when they don’t. So naturally, this makes for ideal chemistry when it comes to sex. Alas, the moral majority can’t abide a film of this nature perpetuating a stereotype that women simply want to be fucked, rolled over and then taken on a shopping spree. To many, it’s a major setback to the feminist movement. Recently, to boot, British pop singer Duffy (who disappeared from the public eye after enduring her own kidnapping experience) has weighed in on the popularity of 365 Days, urging Netflix to remove the movie from its rotisserie after stating to chief executive Reed Hastings, “It grieves me that Netflix provides a platform for such ‘cinema’ that eroticises kidnapping and distorts sexual violence and trafficking as a ‘sexy’ movie. I just can’t imagine how Netflix could overlook how careless, insensitive, and dangerous this is. It has even prompted some young women, recently, to jovially ask Michele Morrone, the lead actor in the film, to kidnap them. We all know Netflix would not host material glamorising paedophilia, racism, homophobia, genocide, or any other crimes against humanity. The world would rightly rise up and scream. Tragically, victims of trafficking and kidnapping are unseen, and yet in 365 Days their suffering is made into a ‘erotic drama’, as described by Netflix.”
The circumstances of the movie are, of course, particularly triggering to Duffy, who was kidnapped on her birthday after being drugged at a restaurant, subsequently taken to another country. And yet, the iterated caveat throughout the film is that Massimo will make no move on her until Laura comes to him within the one-year period (hence the film’s title) he has decided to hold her captive. Granted, that doesn’t stop him from getting handsy and generally hot and bothered whenever Laura deliberately “provokes” him. Driving home a certain “love is like drowning, it’s easier to stop flailing about than it is to keep fighting” philosophy, Massimo pulls out all the stops to impress and woo her, not unlike the Beast with his own decadent castle and sumptuous food offerings (though Laura insists she’ll need to teach the chef how to properly make pierogies) as a means to mitigate an irascible temper. And just as Belle, Laura eventually sees something endearing in Massimo, solidified after he saves her from harm’s way twice in a row–which, to be sure, is old school kryptonite for melting a girl’s heart.
It was said in what has become yet another antifeminist benchmark over time, Sex and the City, specifically in the season three premiere episode “Where There’s Smoke…,” that women, ultimately want a white knight to swoop down and save them from their humdrum (read: poor) existence. Charlotte, the resident Karen of the quartet, responds to Miranda’s demand regarding why firemen are “hot” even when they’re not with, “It’s because women really just want to be rescued.” Carrie then gives her requisite voiceover, “There it was. The sentence independent single women in their thirties are never supposed to think, let alone say out loud.” Feeling the tension among the others, Charlotte continues, “I’m sorry but it’s true. I’ve been dating since I was fifteen. I’m exhausted. Where is he?” Samantha, ever the pragmatist, replies that the white knight “only happens in fairy tales.” Well, to that point, 365 Days is technically a modernized fairy tale, just as its counterpart, Fifty Shades of Grey. Catering to what women have so long been conditioned to feel that they might not even know if it’s what they truly wanted had society not told them otherwise for centuries, authors like James and Lipińska, it can be argued, are merely giving the people what they latently desire. The people, in this case, being women harboring daytime fantasies of being kidnapped by a hot Italian guy with a big dick and an even bigger bank account. Never mind that how he obtains the money is illegal–that only adds to the cachet. The element of “danger as sexiness.” Plus, if he weren’t a hardened criminal, he would never have the chutzpah to kidnap her without fear of reprisal.
“Are you lost, baby girl?” he asks her demeaningly when the two run into one another as she separates briefly from her boyfriend. This is a woman who we’ve seen be fiercely independent in her own day-to-day, suddenly rendered powerless and infantile by a subjugating and sadistic man masquerading as someone who “loves” her.
But is all love in the heteronormative-on-steroids sphere damned to the gender inequality–the overt misogyny–that countless fairy tales have indoctrinated women to believe their worth is still determined by a man’s desire for her? 365 Days would seem to indicate yes. And that’s a large part of why many viewers are experiencing such a love/hate reaction to the movie: it speaks to the innermost concupiscences of a female at her basest primality. A stirring that is difficult for the modern woman to admit to, preferring to write the script off as testosterone-laden drivel. Either that, or people are just watching it for the way better sex scenes than Fifty Shades had to offer (shit, they even got the authenticity of Massimo spitting on Laura’s pussy, whether directly or through the conduit of his fingers).
