Mar 25 2008

Madonna's directorial debut Filth and Wisdom a modest success

"Let's live-blog this thing," Filmbrain joked after we fought our way into the first screening of Madonna's directorial debut Filth and Wisdom yesterday morning. Internet connectivity at the Berlinale being what it is (abysmal), the joke was on us, and the best we could do was sending Twitter messages as soon as Ms. Ciccone's film let out. I strongly suspect that the enormous crowd that was throwing elbows to witness the premiere -- apparently, tickets for the public screenings are going for upwards of 100 Euros on Craigslist Berlin -- wasn't expecting artistic pleasure: we were all rubbernecking, hoping for a disaster.

I'm shocked to report that Filth and Wisdom isn't bad at all. Telling the story of struggling London musician A.K. (Eugene Hutz of the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello) and his friends, the film has a gritty, low-budget feel and, after an opening monologue delivered straight into the camera, doesn't seem to take itself too seriously. In fact, if we didn't know an international superstar was behind the production, Filth and Wisdom would seem like a pleasant indie film with a feel-good moral. Hutz spells it out for us: good and bad, filth and wisdom, are just two sides of the same coin, and either one can take us to redemption.

And redemption -- or at least a paycheck -- is what A.K. is after. When he's not handing out demo CDs or quoting gypsy sayings in an empty bathtub while swilling cognac, he entertains S&M customers in the uniform of an Eastern European general. Among his friends are a ballerina who's learning how to pole-dance (leading to an lascivious training montage), a pill-popping pharmacist who dreams of Africa, and a blind poet who quit writing (Richard E. Grant). With its generous helping of empathy and well-timed jokes, one of them involving her own music, Madonna's debut is a modest success.

The press conference following the screening was so ridiculously packed that desperate photographers who had been banned from the room took to snapping pictures of Madonna and Hutz's images on the monitors in the lobby. I skipped the circus in favor of the competition screening of Quiet Chaos, a comedy directed by Antonio Luigi Grimaldi and starring Nino Moretti.

Quiet Chaos

Given the film's dour theme (a father of a little girl loses his wife) and its dull poster (said father sitting on a park bench), I can't say I blamed those colleagues who passed on Quiet Chaos. Especially after the disappointing Kirschblueten, which also dealt with grief for a spouse, another uneasy mixture of morbidity and mild humor wasn't too high on anybody's list of films to see.

Big mistake. From the opening scenes, in which Pietro (Moretti) saves a woman from drowning only to find his wife Laura dead in their garden with a broken bowl of cantaloupe next to her body, Quiet Chaos gets the ingredients just right without ever overplaying his hand. Unable to feel anything for Laura, whom he may not have loved, Pietro neglects his job and focuses completely on his ten-year-old daughter Claudia (Blu Di Martino). He spends his days in a park outside her school, waiting for her to wave to him from the window during breaks. He grows familiar with a quirky cast of regulars and makes lists about his past.

Pietro's sister-in-law, his famous brother, his secretary, and a sexy stranger walking a St. Bernard stop by, and Pietro discovers new pleasures: reading to his daughter, telling off the boss, smoking opium, and engaging in the festival's most enthusiastic sex scene yet. Melancholic but lively, Quiet Chaos is a sweet crowd-pleaser, but the film, which is based on the novel by Sandro Veronesi, earns its emotions. By the time Roman Polanski shows up for a cameo, the audience at the Palast was eating out of the palm of Moretti's hand.