Pace Press

Issue date: 10/8/08 Section: Arts & Entertainment

It seems like it was only a matter of time until Madonna - that half-century old icon of all things pop, the same Madonna who is married to director Guy Ritchie (having starred in his flop remake of Swept Away) and has been featured in 22 films (most of them immensely forgettable, barring her 1996 turn in Evita) - would try her own hand at film directing. The result is her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, starring Eugene Hutz of the gypsy-punk phenomenon Gogol Bordello as Ukrainian immigrant A.K., an aspiring musician who makes a living as a male dominatrix and brings to life the submersed fantasies and fetishes of London's businessmen and seemingly "ordinary" people.

Living with him are two flatmates, Holly (Holly Weston), an aspiring ballet dancer who takes on a job as a dancer at a gentlemen's club to pay the bills, and Juliette (Vicky McClure), a prescription drug-stealing pharmacy assistant who dreams of traveling to Africa and becoming a humanitarian.

The people in their lives include Juliette's boss, the pharmacist Sardeep (Inder Manocha), who secretly fantasizes about his assistant as a means of escaping the realities of life with his wife and very large contingent of children; the trio's neighbor in the flat downstairs, Professor Christopher Flynn (Richard E. Grant), a former writer, poet, and all-around intellectual who has fallen into a deep, depressive state of hopelessness since losing his eyesight; and Juliette's sister Chloe (Clare Wilkie), the obedient favorite of their parents, yet who, along with Juliette, harbors a terrible secret of their youth.

Early on, Madonna tries to open the film with an artistic theme that could be applied throughout - the concept of duality in our lives regarding our morals and ethics (hence the title). In this respect, she fails, as the film fails to carry any real idea of the sort and all we're left with is Hutz's A.K. uttering a bunch of pseudo-proverbial, half-thought ideas, through his thick but likeable accent, in a series of monologues performed in a dark room while he smokes cigarettes.

What the film truly is, however, is a tapestry of characters with their stories interwoven throughout, and the overlying theme that connects them all - the general discontent that they experience in their lives, which is often the product of unhappy or traumatic experiences they have gone through. In A.K. and Juliette's case, this happened in their respective childhoods, as we're shown in several flashbacks.

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