The Next 365 Days (2022)

The Next 365 Days arrives as the third installment in a Polish erotic trilogy, adapted from the closing volume of Blanka Lipińska's novels and released directly to a streaming service that knows its audience. The director, Tomasz Mandes, shares credit here with Barbara Białowąs, and the result is a film concerned almost exclusively with the question of which handsome man Laura Torricelli will select. Massimo broods in Sicily. Nacho broods in Portugal. Laura broods in transit. The camera lingers on yachts, hotel suites, and the specific agony of a woman who has too many options and no interior life to sort them with.

Over the course of two hours we are given a kink club, a private strip performance, a fashion fair, a beach encounter, a dream sequence involving both suitors at once, and a mother who reminds her daughter that happiness matters. There is a pregnancy that ended badly, a twin brother in a grave, and a gangster father's wisdom about not forcing love. At no point does the film pause to instruct us on representation, climate, labor, or the construction of gender. The bodies are conventionally beautiful and displayed as such. The wealth is gangster wealth, enjoyed without apology. Nobody organizes a union.

The reception was grim, and the critics were not kind, though the film's defenders would argue, correctly, that kindness was never the point. What we have is a melodrama of pure appetite, untroubled by the cultural anxieties of its decade. It lectures no one. It improves no one. As a specimen for our ledger, it is remarkably clean: a blank page, a zero, an artifact of desire and nothing else. There is something almost restful about it.