Lockdown ladies have our guilty pleasures
We women all have our guilty lockdown secrets. Some have fibbed about sneaking out to have a haircut, others about when the cleaner first came back, still more about spiriting in a lover under the cover of darkness.
The one secret I’m prepared to own up to is that I have been seduced by the new Polish erotic romantic movie 365 Days. It has terrible, mumbled dialogue, a ludicrous plot and is the least PC film you can imagine.
It’s been derided by Variety magazine as a ‘thoroughly terrible, politically objectionable, occasionally hilarious Polish humpathon’. And the steamy action makes Fifty Shades look like a PG film.
Yet it has become the most watched netflix movie across the world, and millions of women like me have been glued to it during the crisis.
The plot is about an impossibly wealthy Sicilian mafia boss who falls completely in love at first sight with a woman he sees at an airport.
He tracks her down, abducts her and vows he will release her if, after 365 days, he has not been able to make her love him.
Absurd, I know. outrageous and problematic, too, in that it glamorises a coercive and clearly abusive relationship. I’m not the slightest
I’M GUTTED Love Island, due to start filming in weeks, has been cancelled. What fun it would have been to see them after months in gluttonous lockdown, with flab instead of perfect abs, with frizzy hair, dark roots, dodgy fake tans and home-crafted Brazilian waxes — and that’s just the men! surprised feminist groups are up in arms. And yet, why are so many women watching 365 Days if it is so offensive? Perhaps they enjoy the fantasy of being totally loved, the object of unashamed desire.
After all, that’s a theme that runs through the great canon of romantic fiction, whether it’s Jane Austen, Trollope or Tolstoy.
or is it simply that it’s full of shopping — our heroine has six bodyguards carrying her designer purchases — private jets, glamorous locations and, yes, sex?
The X-rated side of it is so over-thetop it’s comical — although I would not watch it with a teenage child and I believe the flood of pornography on the internet is doing terrible damage to our children.
maybe it was just the escapist nonsense I needed after the monotony of weeks in lockdown dreaming of swapping my leggings for La Perla. whatever the case I see no harm in it — and we’re all allowed our guilty little pleasures.