365 Days: This Day review: Netflix’s Eurotrash sex series goes soft

As a world was wracked by anxiety over a summer lockdown, Netflix released a Polish-Italian romance drama, called For 365 daysIn its algorithm. This softcore fantasyland of yacht sex with thick accents and troubled consent issues was described as low-rent. 50 Shades of GreyThe sequel is flashier and trashier but more inept, cheesier and offensive. Although it was an unambiguously terrible movie, it was still a big hit. It went straight to number one in Netflix’s chart and notched up 10 days there, still one of the longest runs the service has seen.

Here’s the sequel. This Day: 365 daysThe sequel features more sex, or at least more people involved, more expensive clothes and cars, less plot and more visible penises (zero), and more brooding. As difficult as it might be to believe, it’s even worse than the first movie. But it goes down easier, because much of the first film’s ugly side has been smoothed away. That’s a good thing — isn’t it? That depends on who was actually watching. We need to go back and examine the original.

Based on the first of a trilogy of erotic novels by Polish author Blanka Lipińska, For 365 days follows a young woman, Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) from Warsaw to Sicily, where she’s spotted and promptly kidnapped by Massimo (Michele Morrone), a glowering, chiseled, obscenely rich Mafia scion. Massimo was obsessed with Laura from the moment he saw her through his binoculars on a beach that day. His father had been assassinated. He almost lost it all. (The film doesn’t take time to explore why a bullet passing through his father’s body and into his own would carry such a lingering erotic charge for Massimo, but Wow.)

Image by Netflix

Massimo claims he will hold Laura prisoner for 365 consecutive days. That’s enough time for Laura to love him. But while he desperately wants her and he’s used to taking whatever he wants, he promises to refrain from raping her. This is one gentleman. Laura is fiery, and she blazes at him through her captivity. However, it’s not the horror that their situation demands. At the risk of spoilers, before the 365 days are up, they’re consensually going at it in a series of very vigorous, surprisingly vanilla sex scenes.

It was a disturbing and disturbing setup that drew a lot of attention at the time. One of the early scenes in which Massimo verbally demands and gets oral sex from his employee has an unpleasant taste of sexual violence. The bland and largely kink-free nature of the rest of the romps is still colored by the coercion inherent in the film’s premise. The film was co-directed and co-written by women, and based on a book by a woman, but the male gaze dominates both the narrative and the camera’s leering presence.

This review is not able to cover the topic of kidnapping, which has been an established male sex fantasy. It involves complex layers and levels of consent and control. What? For 365 days What it does, is to create an aesthetic space that allows for the fantasy. With its thin characters, bad acting, laughably threadbare plot, music-video direction, and sex that’s explicit only to a point, For 365 days is porn-but-not. You don’t have to feel the drama or the shame of real spit. This can be laughed off. (Perhaps this also explains why people choose to watch stuff like this even when it sits right next to the full-frontal nudity and explicit unsimulated sex of something like Gaspar Noé’s Loving someone you love(also available on Netflix, for a time.

These qualities and more are all shared by the sequel This Day: 365 daysExcept those which made the first film problematic but gave it its (few-wobbly) teeth. Adapted from the second of Lipińska’s books, This Day picks up where the first film left off — kind of. In one of the awkward lurches and clumsy, nonsensical elisions that are the unfortunate trademark of directors Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes, For 365 days’ cliffhanger ending is unceremoniously brushed aside. Now it’s Laura and Massimo’s wedding day!

After some boning, it’s revealed that Laura lost the child she was carrying at the end of the first film, but never mind — more boning. Massimo is still withholding and controlling, but now within the context of a “normal” trophy-wife Mafia marriage — and there’s always the boning. Laura’s best friend Olga (Magdalena Lamparska, charming and garrulous, once again the standout performer by far) couples up with Massimo’s right-hand man Domenico (Otar Saralidze) to join in the boning fun.

Image by Netflix

For the first part of the movie, nothing else is happening. It wastes all the tension and drama that the previous film created, and it is in no hurry to make its own. This DayThe first half is a boring, repetitive frame for fantasy sex. A telenovela-level comedy comes to an abrupt boil in the second part. Massimo’s ex has a nefarious plan, Massimo has family he hasn’t mentioned, and Laura is visited by mysterious, hunky gardener Nacho, who wears a hat that literally says “cock” on it. It’s all very silly in a way that’s almost endearing, although it’s handled so sloppily that it can still become boring.

This Day: 365 days frequently slumps into a torpid haze of wheeling, slow-motion montages that don’t really distinguish between shots of sex, shopping, supercars, and heartwarming family dinners. As prominent is the wealth-porn. There’s a carpet of numb Europop over the whole thing, some of it sung by Morrone himself. (One choice couplet: “I’m a little bit of a psycho / I’m driving you like a Lambo.”)

Defanged of the first film’s problematic premise, This DayIt is much easier to have fun in guilt-free camp. Sometimes, there are hilarious moments when you are just too sloppy to care. The white Lamborghini bridal Lamborghini. The honeymoon game of sex golf, where Laura pole dances on the green’s flag, then spreads her legs to invite Massimo’s putt. The shackles that have “fuck me” embossed on them in gold. It’s an extraordinary display of eyewear. Laura and Massimo hide their frowns and squinting eyes with extravagantly tinted lenses. You can choose from 50 colors.

There’s nothing like reality here, and certainly nothing like real sex. There’s isn’t much sex at all in the last half-hour, as the plot, such as it is, gets down to business and sets up an ending that the inevitable third film will probably ignore. There are no stakes, and there’s little that’s offensive, except to the art and craft of cinema. It’s funny. It’s glossy. It’s a fantasy. It’s safe. It’s soft.

This Day: 365 daysNetflix is streaming it now