365 Days (Netflix)
Starring Michele Morrone as Don Massimo Torricelli, Anna-Maria Sieklucka as Laura Biel
Directed by Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes
Rating: *
Every once in a while there comes a film that is kinky it’s-so-bad-that-it’s-actually-good sub-genre. The Polish film 365 Days is unarguably the most vilified critically damned film of the decade. And yet it tops the Netflix charts. In the month of June alone it was the most widely seen film on Netflix.
No kidding! This, I had to see. And I have to say, 365 Days left me dazed for days. It is a scream, it invents a whole new classification in the business of ‘crass’ dressing. Welcome to the porn-comedy. Not that the humour is intentional. But the wooden performances, the stilted editing, the clunky storytelling and songs that seem to be composed by mentally challenged school kids in a garage…where do I begin to describe the sleazy splendour of 365 Days?
Let me start at the beginning, when we see the rich married heroine Laura(Anna-Maria Sieklucka) pleasuring herself in bed all alone while the rich unmarried hero Massimo(Michele Morrone) gives an all-new definition to an ‘air hostess’ midair service …The two are so steamed up it’s only a matter of time before the screen explodes to the sound of their love-making.
Brace yourself for some of the most inept love-making on this side of Om Puri and Rekha struggling to be steamy in Basu Bhattacharya’s Astha.
Once Massimo kidnaps Laura the film becomes an erotic escapade in a loop, playing on the sizzling couple’s insatiable hunger for fleshly pleasures until we are exhausted just watching them.
In fact, there is this hilarious lengthy sequence of the pair making out in a luxury boat where they simply run out of positions and end up looking like two rabbits wrestling. Perhaps having an experienced choreographer on board would have made the intimate scenes look attractive rather than clumsy.
Beyond showing skin, the lead pair seems to be as lost about lust as an anorexic model without bust. The film soon goes bust, creaking and groaning with the most ridiculous love scenes and a plot twists that seem to be written on toilet paper in a public restroom.
Simply putting two good-looking people on screen is never enough. Passion is much more than a fashion and it doesn’t take long for the erotic to jump into the arena of the idiotic.
365 Days has been pulled up for innumerable transgressions including the glorification of the Stockholm Syndrome. But its worst transgression is making its handsome lead look so miserably handicapped in bed(and everywhere else that their imagination can take us as we follow them fatigued).
So the mystery question. How the hell is this flimsy excuse for cavorting in the raw such a hit?
