After their disastrous collaboration on “Swept Away,” which had as much sexual heat as a Larry the Cable Guy flick, you’d have thought that Madonna and Guy Ritchie would have learned to keep their film projects as far from each other as possible.
But their bad timing might be all gossip hounds’ gain. Madonna’s directorial debut, “Filth and Wisdom,” arrives Friday, just nine days after Ritchie’s “RocknRolla.”
“Filth and Wisdom” features singer/cross-dressing dominatrix A.K. (Eugene Hutz), ballerina turned stripper Holly (Holly Weston) and pharmaceutical employee Juliette (Vicky McClure), all of whom wallow in desperation and, sometimes, sexual depravity while trying to better their lives.
“RocknRolla,” by contrast, is typical Ritchie fare, with hoodlums and heists in London’s seedy underbelly had it not been bogged down.
In gauging these films as a portrait of a marriage, however, we can’t avoid their remarkably different approaches to sexuality.
“Filth and Wisdom,” not surprisingly, brims with it, becoming at times almost a cinematic extension of Madonna’s “Sex” book. A.K. earns his keep as a dominatrix for men, riding one customer on all fours as the man wears not just a saddle but a strapped-on horsetail.
Holly, meanwhile, endures a sustained initiation into pole dancing that segues from humiliation to grace in a ritual that is played matter-of-factly.
The theme behind all of this is that while sexuality itself issometimes a tool of the desperate – a theme Madonna undoubtedly understands – it is not to be regarded with shame. That said, then, we have to wonder how Madonna and her husband have co-existed in the same bed as long as they have.
In “RocknRolla,” when one of Ritchie’s hoods, played by Gerard Butler, is met with a confession of homosexuality from a good mate, he initially reacts as if the man confessed an alliance with al Qaeda. Later, when he commits an act with his good friend outside of his hetero norm, shame seeps from every pore.
Perhaps even more telling, when Butler’s character eventually has sex with a woman – the delectable Thandie Newton, no less – Ritchie edits the scene with such quick cuts that the resulting wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am would drive any erotically discerning diva into the arms of the nearest New York Yankee.
If the films and their directors can’t get their respective sexual attitudes on track, though, they mesh perfectly in their appreciation for dime-store philosophizing. With both films guided by voice-overs, “Filth and Wisdom” offers up such “deep” nuggets as “filth will appear as an oasis in the desert,” while “RocknRolla” provides ruminations like one from a junkie on how cigarettes are just like life.
Despite this tedious similarity, we can’t help but wonder if Ritchie is enough of a RocknRolla for the woman who has one character say to another, “I knew you were a filthy slut,” and uses it as a laugh line.