Gabriel's Inferno: Part II (2020)

Gabriel's Inferno: Part II arrives as the middle movement of a trilogy adapted from Sylvain Reynard's novels, distributed by a streaming service that has staked its existence on the proposition that romance readers deserve faithful adaptations. The plot concerns a Dante scholar named Gabriel Emerson who has at last recalled the identity of Julia Mitchell, the woman he wronged years earlier, and who discovers that the memory arrives too late. She has moved on. He must win her back. There is a trip to Florence. There are leather-bound volumes. There is a great deal of smoldering in corridors.

What the film does not contain is any engagement with the social questions that occupied 2020. There is no commentary on representation, no interrogation of the professor-student power imbalance, no gesture toward identity, environment, or economics. The cast is largely white. The romance is heterosexual and traditional in its architecture: a man pursues, a woman resists, and the narrative resolves toward reunion. Julia's resistance functions as a plot mechanism, not a statement of principle. The film is interested in desire, Dante, and the correct pronunciation of Italian place names.

This leaves us with a curious artifact. A film released in the summer of 2020 that could have been released in 1994 with different haircuts and a smaller budget. It is earnest, glossy, and untroubled by the era that produced it. We assign it a score of zero, and we do so without malice. Some vintages are simply quiet.