Netflix’s controversial Eurotrash sex franchise goes soft in 365 Days: This Day

polygon.com:

In June 2020, as a hot-and-bothered world fretted through a lockdown summer, Netflix slipped a Polish-Italian erotic drama called 365 Days into its algorithm. A softcore fantasy of yacht sex, thick accents, and troubling consent issues, it came across as a low-rent Fifty Shades of Grey: flashier, trashier, simultaneously tamer and more offensive, and much more inept and cheesy. An unequivocally terrible film, it was also an enormous 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.

Now we have a sequel, 365 Days: This Day, which features more sex (or at least more participants), more brooding, more expensive cars and clothes, more unintentional comedy, even less plot, and the same number of visible penises (zero). 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? Well, that depends on why anyone was watching in the first place. To pick that apart, we need to revisit the original.

Based on the first of a trilogy of erotic novels by Polish author Blanka Lipińska, 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. It turns out Massimo has been obsessed with Laura since he observed her on a beach, through binoculars, the day his father was assassinated and he himself almost died. (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,