The Netflix hit “365 Days” (365 Days) by Barbara Byalovas captivates viewers around the world, transferring another story about metaphorical Beauty and the Beast to the erotic plane. We understand how a new variation of the plot of a classic European fairy tale in 2020 turned into a manual on the humiliation of a woman.
The movie begins with the murder of the old boss of a Sicilian mafia family. The bullet was also caught by his son, Massimo Toricelli (Michelle Morrone – “The Medici: Lords of Florence”). The guy missed his father’s funeral because the evil bullet sent him into a short coma. Somewhere on the border of the afterlife, he constantly imagined the image of a certain woman who looks at him without uttering a word. Waking up, Massimo decides to find her at all costs.
The girl turns out to be Laura Belle (Polish theater actress Anna Maria Siklutska will make her debut in a big movie), a young lady celebrating her birthday with friends in a small restaurant. Moving away to powder her nose, Laura literally stumbles upon a brave Sicilian who … steals her and takes her to his estate. Yes, to manage the Sicilian mafia is not to move bags; found a girl – clonidine, taxi, bedroom. Waking up, the girl tries to figure out where she is and how she got here, but her memory fails her. Massimo comes to the rescue, handing Laura a pill and a glass of water.
Take a pill in your mouth, you have side effects from sedatives. Just don’t gnaw, it needs to be sucked.
To which the girl replies:
“Put it in your mouth, you moron!”
The idea of a masculine male is trivial to the point of nausea. His plan is to give the girl 365 days to love him. At the same time, there will be no sex and coercion on his part, only if Laura herself wants to. But prohibitions, as you know, are introduced in order to break them. The life of the main character in prison will not be easy.
365 Days is a film adaptation of the first book in the trilogy by Blanka Lipinskaya, a Polish writer, aka beautician and socialite. The novel was published in 2018, of course, it became a bestseller (more than 500,000 copies were sold). Lipinska herself was ranked second in the ranking of the highest paid writers in Poland last year.
Obviously, the author, and then Barbara Byalovas, who took up the film adaptation of the work, were guided by the success of 50 Shades of Grey. Just look at the cover of the book to understand where all the moves come from. Like E.L. James, it’s about the same development here.
A man is necessarily a rich animal of model appearance with abs, except that Lipinskaya has all the wealth from a dirty business (drugs are mentioned in the dialogues of the characters). A woman is an ordinary simpleton who blossoms when she dresses in a dress of a luxury brand from an expensive boutique.
In the Polish film adaptation there is the most severe disregard for a woman as a person. Actually, no one considers Laura to be such in the frame. The promise of the alpha male, who controls the mafia, is violated in circumstances cleverly arranged by him, so that from the outside her desire looks natural.
In fact, we are dealing with an ordinary Stockholm syndrome, the development of which is aggravated by the girl’s low self-esteem, and later by the emergence of a selfish motive in the spirit of “Pretty Woman” (the heroine of Julia Roberts enjoyed social and economic superiority, because rich Richard Gere was nearby, running after her like a naive child).
Throughout the events of the film, due to the idiotic actions of Laura, the mafia, headed by Massimo, gets involved in a war, then loses money. More and more marks from bullet wounds appear on the body of the hero-lover. Laura notices them in the heat of passion and experiences a barely noticeable emotional shock.
The protective-unconscious traumatic bond between the victim and the abductors is thus strengthened. For some reason, Barbara Byalovas adds to all this talk about love, but it is not entirely appropriate to talk about the emergence of such a feeling in this context.
It’s an amazing phenomenon when books like James’s and Lipinskaya’s become hits, and their adaptations appear in the library of the streaming giant Netflix, attracting the attention of the masses. On the same Netflix, they talk about the importance of a culture of consent in Sex Education.
The world is discussing the increase in singleton people (those who consciously chose loneliness instead of building a social cell with a partner of any gender). HBO is (temporarily) pulling Gone with the Wind due to racism. And the Polish division of Netflix, apparently, exists in a parallel universe that neither #MeToo dialogues, nor elementary human rights, nor common sense have reached. The age of double standards, of course.
Laura in the frame is not even a body, but simply a thing that the head of the mafia stupidly appropriated. He destroyed her past, destroyed her relationship (yes, the guy cheated on her, but the decision to leave him or ask was simply stolen from the girl), placed her in a confined space and in every possible way demonstrated her own superiority. Yes, there is even a conditional analogue of the Red Room, where “sexual experiments” come true – read, any male desires are satisfied from an elementary blowjob to the use of sex toys.
It’s hard to believe, but the film, in which a woman is humiliated, was also shot by a woman. And for Barbara Byalovas, this is not the first time. In her debut feature film Big Love, she also talks about the objectification of a woman, which is inappropriate in modern times, albeit on a much smaller scale.
This, of course, can be a banal fruit of self-reflection, for which money was given, to put it mildly, by not very distant producers. But the beginning of the trilogy (yes, there will be two more films!) looks like a caustic satire on the notorious new ethic with its intolerant standards.
True, the authors did not take into account that even the great actress Catherine Deneuve, who at first defended the right of men to “molest women”, apologized to the community in less than a week. Where are the Polish secular lionesses, who imagine themselves writers and directors, declaring that a woman in 2020 has turned from a subject of activity into an object that someone else manages.
Interestingly, last year the same story as with “365 days” happened to the Romanian mainstream “Oh, Ramona!” Christina Jakob (no time to explain, look at the poster in the form of a vagina).The same heap of negative assessments by critics and viewers, while the viewing statistics go off scale. It seems that not only our American people love everything …
