Since her star turn in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna has had over two decades to hone her celebrity persona. In Filth and Wisdom, in which the singer is credited not only as director and scriptwriter, but also as “creator,” the many aspects of this persona are dumped, unceremoniously and in an undigested heap, on the audience. It’s not pretty. There is kinky, there is rebellious, there is cross-dressing, there are slabs of dialogue straight out of a motivational self-help manual, and, of course, screeds about the starving children in Africa.
Filth and Wisdom sets the scene with three remarkably improbable flatmates. There is the singer A.K. (played by Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, whose music features extensively in the film and is probably the most interesting part of the whole 81-minute experience), who desperately tries to get a gig while keeping body and soul together as a dungeon-master providing S&M lite to paying customers. There is Holly the unemployed ballerina, who finds her real self performing as a stripper at an upmarket gentleman’s club. A.K. is passionately in love with her, but for all his wild, freakish behavior, finds it impossible to declare his interest. And finally, there is Juliette, who works and pops pills at a drug store owned by pharmacist Sardeep, who spends much of his time making love to her coat in the cloak room as the only way of escaping from his harridan of a wife.
Even for a Friends’-style romantic comedy, the improbability factor is astonishingly high right from the first few minutes of the film. Throw in a blind poet (Richard E. Grant), whose poems inspire A.K.’s songs, and Francine (Francesca Kingdon), Holly’s tough love instructor in the arts of pole dance, and it simply goes through the roof. It is impossible to believe in any of the characters, let alone sympathize with them, and the philosophizing voice-over in a heavy Slavic accent — spoken by Hutz — spouting pop psychology and referencing Nietzsche, is likely to send many members of the audience either to sleep or out the door.
Although utterly inept, there are many moments when Filth and Wisdom seems on the verge of embarking in some interesting direction. There are times when Madonna’s infatuation with style can be briefly mistaken for profundity, but in the end, her dragnet of contemporary issues comes across as an adolescent attempt to impress. For an effort by one of the sharpest players on the international celebrity scene, Filth and Wisdom is not only something of a joke, but one that falls flat on its face.
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