Not to diminish any of her myriad accomplishments (and I will never, ever begrudge her creative partnership with David Fincher), but it seems inarguable that history will remember Madonna most vividly as a cultural vampire: a supernatural creature (who, if not verifiably immortal, then certainly in hard-earned denial about her age), she’s sustained herself by sucking the lifeblood other artists, images, trends, cultural movements. From the punkish red scrawl of the opening credits forward (Is dotted with white Xs), Madonna’s feature directorial debut Filth and Wisdom seems of a piece with her previous work, in that it’s in some way about Madonna herself hiding behind borrowed aesthetics.
Madonna has previously namechecked everyone from Godard to Pasolini as an inspiration, but while Filth and Wisdom has traces of the invention via ignorance seen in those auteurs’ early films, that’s where the comparisons end. The influence of Shane Meadows is definitely felt, both as a love letter to the youthful romance of punk rock in poverty in the pocket of a British city, and in the presence of co-star Vicky McClure, late of three Meadows films including This is England. But Madonna gets the bulk of her borrowed essence from her star, Eugene Hutz, lead of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. The clumsy brilliance of Filth and Wisdom is the way it wraps material that’s clearly personal to Madonna in the irresistibly goofy trappings of Hutz’ Joe Strummer-of-the-Eastern Bloc persona and performance style. For fans of Hutz and his band, Filth has the makings of an instant music-movie classic. Fortunately for Madonna, whose major misstep as a filmmaker is the compulsion to divide her own personality traits and obsessions equally among her characters, Hutz is so likeable that he attracts a lot of fans at first sight.
Hutz plays A.K., a punk singer who pays his share of the rent in a London flat by moonlighting as a dom to insecure businessmen. He lives with two young ladies, ballerina-turned-unhappy stripper Holly (Holly Weston), who A.K. loves (mostly) from afar, and Juliette (McClure), an androgynously sexy pharmacist who dreams of hopping off to Africa to work with AIDS orphans. Throughout, Madonna references her own past (her ambitous lean years, her discovery that her dancer’s body could function as a “cash box” if (un)dressed appropriately) and present (her Kabbalah fixation, her –– here admittedly partially self-serving –– interest in African AIDS orphans), with a transparency that’s often clunky but always earnest and often endearing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a filmmaker Madonna proves as inept at crafting and shooting dialogue as she has been at speaking it under the direction of others, but she seems extremely comfortable (and is usually successful at) filming bodies in performance to music, whether at the barre or in a dingy rock bar or twirling around a pole. Episodic and light on plot, Filth often feels like a number of music videos stitched together; refreshingly, Madonna seems almost uninterested in using her own music. Other than two “Erotica”-era cues in the strip club (where Holly at one point wears an outfit that looks like a costume from the Girlie Show tour, and elsewhere milks the most out of an easy but irresistable joke involving one of Madonna’s famous consorts), all of the music in film is performed by Hutz and Gogol Bordello. Filth is close enough in structure to a classic music narrative, that its actual lack of narrative weight becomes easy to overlook.
Hutz is so compelling that he’s able to convincingly transmute a good deal of clearly Kabbalah-inspired voiceover into his patented, gypsy exotica. Though whole patches of the script are fuzzy with vague notions of duality that never seem to quite connect to the events of the narrative (the words “filth” and “wisdom” are inserted into Hutz’ monologues liberally, to the point where one gets the feeling that neither means quite what Madonna and co-writer Dan Cadan think they mean), this crack-pot claptrap seems to flow so naturally out of Hutz that it ends up being far less pretentious than you might think. (Less elegantly rendered is the theme that all children suffer abuse of some sort at the hands of a patriarch; “Oh, Father” said about the same with much more grace.) The jury is still out as to whether or not Ms. Ciccone-Ritchie has much to offer the world as a filmmaker, but she does have the, uh, wisdom to make the most out of her star’s natural charisma. Just for creating a vehicle which offers the pleasure of watching Eugene Hutz being Eugene Hutz, she’s done the Kabbalah version of a mitzvah.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth