“Filth and Wisdom”, directed by Madonna

“Filth and Wisdom”, directed by Madonna

Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, about which we were healthily skeptical, is not being panned by every single critic who sees it. In fact, The Times of London reviewer who previewed Filth at the Berlin Film Festival gave it three stars out of five. But what a bad good review:

“Filth and Wisdom…stars Eugene Hutz as a Ukrainian gypsy with an intensely annoying habit of looking the camera in the eye and spouting gobbets of wisdom that have as much relevance to real life as Chinese fortune cookies.”

“Madonna puts a little too much faith in her writing powers…”

“…there is some clunkingly awful acting and a string of scenes that are so stagey they would fall over if they weren’t propped up by the cinema screen.”

And yet the last paragraph begins thusly: “…despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud.”

Madonna says she identified with the subject matter because it’s about struggling performers of which she was one. She spoke about “the cold harsh reality when I arrived in New York only to find that there were thousands of girls that wanted to do the same thing, and I wasn’t so special after all - that I was never going to be able to pay the rent . . . and that I was going to have to do other things to feed myself.”