Madonna has done it again—she just gave pop music yet another innovation.
Her latest release, Confessions 2: The Film, is the first-ever visual album sampler. Wedged between a traditional video single and a conventional visual album, the short film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, features a series of shorts, each set to a snippet of the first six songs from her upcoming new album. It’s not a stop-and-start affair but a continuous stream of music, movement, and narrative momentum, with transitions seamlessly bridging the segments into a cohesive whole.
Make that a raging river, as the film is in a constant state of propulsive motion, pushing ever forward and never pausing to give Madonna time to catch her breath, even between songs. It follows the 67-year-old as a SWAT-like troop of scantily-clad women, each handling a video camera, storms into her apartment, sending her off to a frenzied night of rave and reverie on the town and beyond.
There’s a segment set in a lush forest filled with women shooting laser lights from their orifices, with Madonna appearing to have a spotlight of her own shining between her legs. A snippet sees her doing aerial somersaults over a sweaty warehouse club party, and a section follows her into a big all-gender restroom where she walks into sleaze and debauchery (more suggested than explicit) before everyone breaks into freestyle dance. In between, she performs a choreographed acrobatic solo routine on a big table inside an apartment, pounds on a glass wall until it cracks, and figures in a (non-fatal) car crash.
And there are the interactions with other celebrities: dueting with Sabrina Carpenter (on the album’s official first single “Bring Your Love”) and Latin rapper Feid (“Read My Lips”); morphing into Julia Garner, the actress Madonna personally handpicked to play her in a biopic that she herself has written; dancing with longtime best friend, actress Debi Mazar, Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange in the Avengers films) and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones); and acting with Richard E. Grant and Kate Moss. And there are the Easter eggs from Madonna’s career strewn throughout.
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Fast and furious, Confessions 2: The Film plays like a fever dream set to music. There’s a lot going on at any given time, the video is an assault to the senses, of the best kind. And it’s a testament to Madonna’s mastery of the art form, under the able hands of young directors Torso, that it never teeters on the verge of collapsing under its own weight.
But where does the video fit in the Madonna filmmography? What does it mean in her narrative? What does it represent in her canon?
In a legendary, unmatched career already bursting at the seams with pioneering, boundary-pushing, trendsetting videos, Confessions 2 stands as one of her finest works. You would have to go all the way back, past the first Confessions era, to 1998 to find the most recent collection of visuals from one Madonna album that are as bold, brave, inventive, brilliant, and bonkers.
Ray of Light, both the album and the videos, is the spiritual successor of 1989’s Like A Prayer and 1992’s Erotica as the eras that caught Madonna taking on the roles she saw she needed to play in the pop world: the starlet as soulful confessional singer-songwriter (Prayer); the culture provocateur (Erotica); Earth Mother (Light).
Don’t call them reinventions. Madonna has long protested the widely held view that her ever-constant changes were/are the product of calculation and manipulation. They’re natural evolution for a restless and adventurous artist, especially one with a razor-sharp ear and instinct for pop culture. And Madonna has proven time and again that there’s no artist in all of music history that fits the bill more than she does.
Confessions 2: The Film is the latest proof. It’s so stacked with so much creativity and energy, not to mention fun and attitude, into its 11-minute runtime, it would handily beat any 30- or 60-minute collection of stand-alone music videos by other current chart-topping artists—solo or group—half Madonna’s age. She didn’t need to do something like this at this point in her storied career, but she has never been one to phone it in. Laziness is just not in her MDNA.
This time she fully embraces her role as Queen Mutha: singular artist (table dance routine) who, as the actress Bette Midler infamously introduced her in a major global music event in 1984, “pulled herself up by her bra straps” and by the sheer force of personality and her will (the restroom segment); birther and nurturer of pop girls, boys, and non-binaries (forest segment, warehouse party); social media superstar, magnet of intense scrutiny, arouser of awe, inspirer of reductivity, igniter of derision (the SWAT thread).
The film’s ending may seem random, even non-sensical. But if there’s anything any Madonna stan and observer has learned it’s that nothing is random with the Madonna; everything is intentional.
There are only two takeaways from the scene, in which the superstar’s 29-year-old firstborn Lourdes Leon, unmasked in an eaelier scene as a member of the female SWAT squad, barks “Stop, bitch” directly to the camera with a hint of a smirk, and it is this: either it’s Madonna, thru her daughter, telling the world to eff off or that she is nobody’s fool and only takes orders from her children. Or, in true Madonna fashion, both.
Confessions 2: The Film does a fantastic job as an album sampler. In the evidence of the brilliance— lyrically, thematically, musically—of the song snippets, it promises to deliver one of Madonna’s career-best records on July 3.
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