Berlinale: Filth and Wisdom

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Hysteria at the Zoo Palast, photographers fighting for position, schoolgirls and some others who were old enough to know better begging for tickets, a pop star, and a decidedly average movie. That the Berlinale took the opportunity to show Madonna’s directorial debut is not really surprising, given the hype and media coverage that it generated, but it is a little sad to see such scenes for a movie that would struggle to make it past the television programmers of even Channel Five if it didn’t have a certain name attached to it.

The story is…well, the story is just a little bit silly, but anyway there’s a Ukrainian singer who has to make his living dominating little Englanders, a blind poet, a ballet dancer who has to turn to stripping to pay the bills, and a chemist’s assistant who dreams of being an aid worker in Africa. They all have to find a way to make themselves happy with their lot in life or achieve their dreams, but the biggest problem you have watching the movie is that it is extremely hard to care either way. The script deals in stereotypes and cheap laughs - Indians in England have lots of kids and say “bloody hell” a lot - the acting is wooden, the story is not only boring but stupid, and if I hadn’t been with friends I would probably have walked out of the cinema, something I have only done once before in my life. Madonna seemed quite nice though.

The main actor, Eugene Hutz - lead singer of the excellent gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello - was as good as he could be with the material he had to work with, and the best parts of the film were the scenes where we saw him and the band playing. A documentary about him and his bandmates would have easily been a more interesting and enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. Madonna described the film as being her “film school”, which is nice for her, but it does seem sad that when there are so many talented filmmakers who could make a better film than Filth and Wisdom with their eyes closed and a tenth of the money, and who struggle to get their short films into the smallest of film festivals, that this genuinely bad movie is given a Panorama slot at one of the world’s most respected film festivals, just because a pop star made it.

Ah well, we are all living in a material world.

More stuff:
Filth and Wisdom at the IMBd.
The Telegraph review from Sheila Johnston.
Article about the film in Der Spiegel.

EDIT:
Peter Bradshaw’s review in the Guardian includes this most memorable of lines:
“She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens.”

On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Wonderlust King’, Gogol Bordello.

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