STORY: A strapping young Sicilian mafia boss Massimo Torricelli kidnaps Laura, a young sales executive from Warsaw. He gives her 365 days to fall in love with him. Will she?
REVIEW: It doesn’t take a genius or even a spoiler alert to know if Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka) will indeed bite the bullet. The multiple sex scenes in the trailer of this Netflix film make it quite clear where the film’s flimsy plot is headed. It’s pretty simple but also preposterous and highly problematic. The day his father is assassinated, Massimo Torricelli (Michele Morrone) spots a beautiful woman on a beach. Five years on, Massimo is now the ruthless leader of his family business, but he continues the search for this woman, all over the world. Until one day, when she lands in Sicily for a holiday, Massimo promptly drugs and kidnaps her. His mission – hold her captive and use all sorts of tactics to get her to fall in love with him within 365 days.
Based on a Polish novel ‘365 Dni’, this erotic drama seems like a sorry excuse for softporn. The film’s basic premise is like ‘Beauty and the Beast’, but here the plot is built almost entirely around the smoking hot good looks of its leading man Massimo and never even tries to evolve beyond that. As per one of the lines used to describe Massimo, “He is one meter, 90 centimeters tall, has absolutely no body fat and has been molded by God himself.” While Massimo is indeed all of that and more, his brooding handsomeness and raw machismo cannot serve as a replacement for an engaging story.
The film’s writing is weaker than its lead characters’ self-control. There’s a lot of erotica with passionate love-making scenes at every given opportunity or the lack of it (a la ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’). These scenes are shot aesthetically and are clearly the most exciting part of the otherwise dull narrative. However, even with so much erotica, the inherently weak story does little to arouse any genuine interest in the proceedings. This is partly also because the characters are barely fleshed out. While Massimo gets some sort of an arc going from a carefree youngster to a dreaded Mafia boss, Laura’s character remains quite half-baked and erratic. From coercion to consent, we never get to see what Laura really stands for. All we do get to see is the sizzling chemistry between her and Massimo that plays out in fancy bedrooms, public toilets and exotic yachts.
With scenes glorifying physical bondage and outrageous dialogues, ‘365 Days’ ends up romanticising forced sex and manipulation. In the end, you’re left with a few moments of pleasure but the rest is all pain.