Gabriel's Inferno (2020)

Gabriel's Inferno arrives from PassionFlix, a studio built on the proposition that romance novels deserve faithful adaptation and that audiences will pay for it. The film follows Gabriel Emerson, a Dante scholar with a tortured past, and Julia Mitchell, his former student, as they orbit each other through Toronto and Florence. There is longing, there is a lecture on the Divine Comedy, there is a great deal of brooding in well-tailored clothing. It is a 2020 release, which is the interesting part, because almost nothing in it behaves like a 2020 release.

The courtship is old-fashioned in the most literal sense. Gabriel pursues, Julia demurs, and the power imbalance of the professor and the pupil gets folded into the passion instead of examined for problems. No interrogation of the arrangement occurs. No third-act reckoning with the ethics of it arrives. The film treats the whole business as romance, full stop, and the machinery runs on jealousy, redemption, and a man learning to be gentle. Whatever progressive sensibilities the era has trained us to expect from a love story with a contemporary setting, this one declines to supply them.

We found no representation agenda, no identity politics, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance, no revision of any historical record. The cast is largely white, the couples are heterosexual, the bodies are conventionally attractive, and the closest the film comes to a thesis is that Dante's hell makes a useful metaphor for personal shame. This is a romance doing what romances did before anyone asked them to do anything else. Classified accordingly, with the weary acknowledgment that a film can be many things, and ideologically inert is one of them.