365 Days (365 Dni) knows exactly what women want: to be abducted by hunky, wealthy strangers, sexually terrorized, taken out shopping and to swanky nightclubs and on luxurious yachts, and told that they must not only accept their circumstances for an entire year, but also fall madly in love with their captor. I mean, who doesn’t dream of being a sex slave for a rich, violent, narcissistic psychopath with a heart of gold?
A Polish Fifty Shades of Grey-style romance whose incessant softcore sequences fall just shy of Pornhub-grade explicit, 365 Days is dumb, corny, misogynistic and morally reprehensible. Still, getting worked up about its outdated—and thoroughly sexist—gender politics is to treat it with a level of seriousness, and respect, that’s at odds with its own frivolous idiocy. Come for the simulated bumping and grinding, stay for the ridiculous drama, stilted acting, hilarious soundtrack, and laughably offensive ideas about male and female desire.
Available on Netflix, 365 Days contends that true happiness is achieved through entitled assault and materialistic excess, which means it’s the sort of fantasy designed to appeal to the likes of Donald Trump. Its story begins with the assassination of an Italian mob boss right in front of his son Massimo (Michele Morrone), who also suffers a near-fatal wound. Five years later, Massimo is the head of his Sicilian mafia family, and uses his power to kidnap Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka), a Polish beauty who’s also a tough businesswoman of some ill-defined sort, and eager to ditch her lame boyfriend Martin (Mateusz Łasowski). Nabbed on the street, Laura awakens in one of Massimo’s many lavish residences, where he explains that, when he was close to death, he saw a vision of her—and has since been searching for her, as well as decorating his homes with giant painted portraits of her.
Massimo may be a tall, chiseled, well-groomed stud in an unbuttoned black shirt and matching slacks, but he’s creepy through and through. Laura thinks this too, at least at first, what with Massimo continually asking her, with maximum paternalistic sultriness, “Are you lost, baby girl?” As evidenced by a prior blowjob received from a flight attendant—a scene paired with the sight of Laura pleasuring herself with a vibrator—Massimo likes to seductively pull women’s bottom lips down with his thumb, an act he repeats when giving Laura an ice cube and telling her to “suck it.” He then explains that she’ll be his prisoner for the next year, during which time she’ll come to love him. He reassures her by saying, “I won’t do anything without your permission,” even though he admits, “I’m not used to tolerating disobedience.”
Massimo is an alpha brute whose domineering attitude and rough physical behavior (marked by grabbing women around the throat) is meant to be irresistible, and while she initially trembles a lot in his company, Laura is soon swept off her feet by him. It helps that Massimo is a gangster who only shoots bad people, and that deep down, he craves a tough woman like her, who’ll take his sadism and then also dish it back out, thus taming him and allowing her to have the upper hand. This dynamic is borrowed straight from E.L. James’ bestselling novels (and their subsequent cinematic adaptations), with the only twist being that 365 Days is far more interested in pushing the envelope when it comes to on-screen depictions of Massimo and Laura’s carnality. From Massimo drooling into Laura’s crotch before going down on her, to multiple instances of vigorous oral sex in which a woman’s mouth is just out of view, the film works overtime flirting with X-rated graphicness.
Alas, that doesn’t make it very titillating. Much of that is attributable to the fact that the film is downright rapey. Early on, Massimo informs Laura, “Sometimes fighting is futile. You have to accept the situation.” Later, after tying her up, he tells her, “You see, Laura. At this moment, you’re immobilized enough that you can’t resist me anymore. At the same time, I have access to absolutely every bit of your body.” Domination and submission are the primary elements of 365 Days, which sexualizes every aspect of its story, including Laura’s friendship with BFF Olga (Magdalena Lamparska). As written by Tomasz Klimala, Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes and Blanka Lipińska (based on Lipińska’s book), it’s an orgy of erotic nonsense in which lips are often licked (especially after eating melting ice cream cones), clothes are routinely discarded, and affluence is joyfully fetishized at every turn.
Directors Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes shoot Massimo and Laura’s trysts like a music video, replete with heavy color filters, slanted lighting, endless posing and cheesy pop songs full of on-the-nose lyrics—including a few sung by lead actor Morrone. The whole affair is so wantonly trashy it makes Netflix’s recent White Lines look reserved in comparison. Such luridness, however, doesn’t translate to actual excitement. Sieklucka and Morrone are certainly easy on the eyes, but their chemistry is compromised by Massimo’s scary take-what-he-wants thuggery and Laura’s doltish attraction to his hostage-taking monstrousness. There’s no way to ignore such ideas and simply revel in the proceedings’ superficial opulence because they’re constantly being shoved in one’s face, reminding one that, at its core, 365 Days is a fairy tale about bonkers sexual abuse.
365 Days has many ancillary problems: it only boasts seven characters, five of whom are of no consequence; its actors’ English is amusingly clumsy and affected; its underworld subplots are so slight that they barely exist; and its cliffhanger finale—coming after montages of Laura trying on dresses, going to the spa, and screwing on a big boat—is predicated on a hostile love triangle that’s only established by one prior scene. In the end, though, this tawdry bit of summertime fluff is defined by what it’s not: original, engaging, or nearly as taboo as it wants to be. For all its over-the-top steaminess, the fact that directors Białowąs and Mandes always cut away just before their camera reveals Massimo’s oft-discussed package (“While you’re looking at it, do you want to touch it?”) proves emblematic of the project as a whole: a dim-witted tease without any real balls.
