Tagline: “Filth and Wisdom — two sides of the same coin.”
Translation: Madonna still wants to prove that you’re a hypocrite about sex.
The Verdict: Even though she doesn’t appear in the film itself, Madonna’s debut as a feature-film director is exactly what you might expect from a Madonna movie, right on down to revisiting her S&M themes from the early nineties. The tone is pitched somewhere between campy and self-righteous, and its characters divide recognizable aspects of Madge’s persona into a trio of quirky indie-film caricatures. There’s a ballerina who finds pleasure and moral conflict in her newfound exhibitionism, a woman who “cares a lot about starving children in Africa but doesn’t know that she’s starving too,” and eccentric, mustachioed Gogol Bordello–frontman Eugene Hutz as a magnetic rock singer who doubles as a sex worker specializing in role-playing scenes. If nothing else, Hutz could nudge Madonna’s transparent self-involvement into something more silly and fun. Click to watch.
