Filth and Wisdom: Madonna’s 2008 Film and a Cross-Dressing Dominatrix

Filth and Wisdom is Madonna’s 2008 feature, her first as a director, made by her company Semtex Films. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and split people. For readers who follow BDSM on screen, the point is not a pure training film and not the tabloid version of Madonna. It is a messy London snapshot of sex work paying for art. The hook is the male lead, A.K., who funds a rock dream by working as a cross-dressing dominatrix. The people on screen are adults. Sex work, stripping, and paid domination are how these immigrant artists get by.

The shoot sits on real rooms. Principal photography ran in London from 14 to 29 May 2007, with more scenes in July. The strip clubs are real Secrets Clubs venues in Hammersmith and Swiss Cottage. The Gypsy-punk band in the film is Gogol Bordello. They contributed three songs. Their singer, Eugene Hütz, plays A.K., the rock lead who likes to talk. He also wrote extra dialogue, and Madonna used it.

The flatmates

A.K. shares a flat with two women. Holly, played by Holly Weston, is a ballet dancer who strips and pole-dances at a local club. Juliette, played by Vicky McClure, is a pharmacy assistant who wants to go to Africa and help starving children. Richard E. Grant plays Professor Flynn. Ade plays a DJ. Olegar Fedoro plays A.K.’s father. Stephen Graham plays Harry Beechman. The sex work and the pro-domme job are part of how these people live, not a single shock set.

What the reviews said

The film is filed as comedy, drama, musical, and romance. Reviews did not agree on whether it holds together. Rotten Tomatoes, in reporting from about mid-2020, had 63 reviews, about 25 percent positive, average about 3.94 out of 10. The consensus: ambitious, and mostly unconvincing and incoherent. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker mocked the craft and joked that if the actors were paid by talent they would not have cost forty bucks. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that Madonna had been a terrible actor and had now graduated to a terrible director. The Times Online said she had done herself proud. Jonathan Romney in Screen International called it a good-humoured, cheap, cheerful vanity project, and said Madonna still could not direct actors.

People looking for polished rope or a formal SM feature will not find it here. What the film does put on a Berlin festival slate is paid domination and strip labor, and a rock singer keeping himself afloat by working as a cross-dressing dominatrix among other immigrant artists.