ALL STEAM, NO SUBSTANCE
If this new Netflix entry looks so hot, why does the movie leave Robbie Collin so cold?
365 Days Streaming, Netflix
For anyone worried that lockdown would plunge film as an art form into creative stasis, I’m happy to report that only yesterday I saw what I believe was a new cinematic first: a sex scene that was shot from a helicopter. The sequence in question is the centrepiece of 365 Days, a new European erotic thriller that’s currently going gangbusters on Netflix, and is, by any objective measure, absolutely frightful.
Based on the first in a trilogy — uh-oh — of books by the Polish cosmetologist turned novelist Blanka Lipińska, 365 Days charts the tumultuous relationship between a beautiful young Polish sales executive called Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka) and the hunky Sicilian Mafia kingpin Massimo (Michele Morrone), who drugs and kidnaps her while she’s on holiday then holds her captive for one calendar year. All the old softy wants is for her to fall in love with him, and if she hasn’t by day 366, she’ll be free to walk.
Picture a cross between Fifty Shades of Grey and Beauty and the Beast and you may begin to fathom the full horror of the exercise, which is effectively two hours of high-sheen wealth porn interspersed with what might as well be porn-porn, staged in the time-honoured Austin Powers style that keeps any genitals just out of frame, or obscured by a prop.
In February, 365 Days enjoyed a brief cinema release over the Valentine’s Day weekend, but streaming is clearly its natural home: Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes’s film is currently the most-watched title on Netflix in the U.K. and all over Europe, and was only unseated in the U.S. last weekend by Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.
Word of mouth has spread, thanks in no small part to the video-sharing platform Tiktok, where red-faced and squawky reaction videos abound on the hashtags #365days and #365dni (365 Dni is the film’s Polish title). Many of these giddily riff on an already notorious shower room clinch, in which Massimo grabs
Laura by the throat and pulls her in for an initially non-consensual encounter — “she likes it, really” being the film’s go-to interpersonal dynamic. But I have to say I was more struck by what is already commonly known as “the yacht scene,” in which Massimo accidentally shoves Laura overboard during a tiff, then dives in and rescues her, before the couple embark on a lovemaking montage that eats up four unbroken minutes of screen time, and could fairly be described as Olympian.
It’s unclear whether the depicted sexual activity takes place on a single occasion or over a number of months, but it’s exhausting just to watch, even from the distance that the aforementioned helicopter’s-eye view affords.
The scene impresses on a purely athletic level, and Morrone and Sieklucka have animal sex appeal in spades.
Yet I found the whole pounding, sweating, grunting business the binary opposite of sexy, and wince-inducingly inauthentic to boot. That’s partly down to the fact that I simply don’t fall into the target demographic for the specific fantasy scenario that 365 Days is peddling, which brackets sexual fulfilment with the kind of grotesque wealth that even the Kardashians might consider a smidgen overdone. And there are also some terrifically corny stylistic choices to battle through, from the soft-rock songs that play to completion throughout every tryst to a camera that keeps circling the action so hungrily that the cinematographer might as well have been riding a hyena.
But it’s also because sex shown for its own sake always presents film with an existential problem: As an inherently voyeuristic medium, it turns the viewer into a gooseberry, rather than allowing them the comfort of lurking unnoticed in the dark. The greatest sex scenes in cinema are never about the sex act itself. Rather, they use sex to express something fundamental, and perhaps even otherwise inarticulable, about their characters’ inner lives.
Those 365 Days Tiktok videos suggest that being kidnapped then pampered by an attractive psychopath is a generic fantasy with widespread appeal.
The problem with 365 Days is it tells you nothing new at all. Yachts, lingerie and shopping sprees?
Even I could have thought of that.