Filth And Wisdom
True, this was her first stab at directing a feature, but Madonna has been developing her directing acumen since the Eighties. Critics the world over hailed her Fellini, Antonioni and "Night Porter"-inspired videos for "Open Your Heart," "Justify My Love," and "Erotica" (to name a few) as the closest pop ever comes to high art.
Unfortunately, years in the conjugal bed with Guy Ritchie weren’t enough for Madge to learn how to stretch those kinds of three-minute masterpieces into an even halfway decent movie.
That’s a shame since Filth and Wisdom draws from the most intriguing chapter of Madonna’s autobiography: her hardscrabble beginnings as a dumpster-diving disco diva in the big city who never knew when her break would come.
But this time, early Eighties New York isn’t Madonna’s dominion. Instead, the plot centers on three struggling flatmates in present-day London--A.K. (Eugene Hutz, "Everything Is Illuminated," Gogol Bordello frontman), Holly (Holly Weston, "Splintered"), and Juliette (Vicky McClure, "A Room for Romeo Brass").
No stranger to sleaze, Madonna casts the narrator, A.K., as a Ukrainian gypsy-punk singer who spouts a lot of Kabbalah-esque aphorisms while keeping body and soul together as an S&M rentboy. Likewise, ballerina Holly subsidizes her fine-arts aspirations by straddling strip-joint poles in Soho. Meanwhile, pharmacist assistant Juliette has to defer her dream of being a nurse in Africa (closest issue to Madonna’s heart) until she can save enough money to go work for relief NGOs (?). Until then, Juliette will pilfer pills for her humanitarian future from a henpecked boss who’s busy dry-humping whatever outerwear she hangs on the coat-rack.
It all adds up to yet another Madonna misfire, complete with mediocre acting, an incoherent script, and prosaic raunch (cf. her book Sex). If only she could bring to cinema what she brings to music videos! But how often have Madonna and the big screen proved a winning combination?
