365dni

*** May contain some spoilers ***

Discussion of this movie was making the rounds on Twitter so last night, after I did some work on my podcast outline, I started it up. (My podcasts are slowly being propagated through most major platforms.)

I didn’t make it very far in the movie. To be fair, I like dark erotica, and my novel “Blood and Frost” is pretty hardcore. I try to be clear going in that there is dubcon and other really intense themes and I show them. I wanted Jonathan to be sympathetic to a point but also make it clear he was an asshole as well.

I was concerned about “365dni” a bit because when I saw the trailer, it made it seem like he was ‘buying’ her; kidnapping is okay if there’s materialism involved, and it looked glammed up. I can see some of the appeal of a situation with a forceful suitor, but as people pointed out, the movie, the way it was presented and the hype around it sort of seemed to be glorifying and normalizing this as acceptable. It’s a weird line I tread; it’s interesting in books in that it’s taboo and allows exploration of drastic power differences among other things, but you don’t want this behaviour in REAL LIFE to become acceptable in any way.

I didn’t get into the ‘story’ in the movie much in that time, and to be honest I don’t believe there is a lot there. You can see quite a bit in the trailer; Massimo takes over the crime family after his father is killed, and in the movie that scene is just about as stupid as I’ve ever seen. Laura is dancing on some rocks near an island that is supposed to be secured for this meeting between families. It’s in the middle of the Med, there are no boats nearby, but she is there. Okay. And his dad is shot through the heart and it goes through and hits Massimo in the lower abdomen. I guess maybe it ricocheted off a rib? The guards cry over the bleeding bodies, but where did the sniper come from? There doesn’t appear to be another building on the island, except for the lighthouse they are on!

I hate when movies/books do shit like that. Things that don’t make sense – continuity or scene wise – are there, and you should just ‘accept’.

Laura’s boyfriend, Martin, is also tagged as someone you aren’t supposed to like and he is absolutely flat as a character. From the way he dresses and acts, he is clearly made to be bad and unlikeable – there is no effort at complexity, he is a caricature of the negligent boyfriend. They are such a mismatch there is no opportunity to try and feel sympathy for him, and I found myself thinking Laura, our ‘heroine’ was an idiot for being with such a self-serving buffoon in the first place.

There was a scene with Massimo chatting with investment advisors who somehow lost 88% of his money. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think that an investment group with a mob kingpin as a client is going to fuck him out of 88% of his investments? I laughed out loud when I realised what the premise was; it was childish, a plotline that a 10 year old might think is okay but 10 years later they realise how insipid and puerile it was. The movie tried really hard to push that Massimo is not really bad, even though he’s the leader of a mob family. He has some ethics!

The stars were beautiful people and the sets and costumes were amazing, however, but bad dialogue – “Are you lost, baby girl?” for example – just was silly. There was clearly sexual tension between the characters who played Massimo and Laura – and I have never seen a man look better in a suit – but the pretty trappings weren’t enough to save me from the eyerolls. The plot was choppy, with scenic vignettes with no context (the car in the alley for example), so the movie didn’t feel strung together.

Made me wish I could go on a vacation somewhere nice, however!

Did you watch the movie? What did you think?

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