The elder statesman of the group (despite being an eternal punk), Sono takes us to Tokyo for a perversely hilarious comedy about an uptight family who are all lured into the same sex club. Fortunately, Sion Sono swoops in to save the day. Playful in spots and sensitive throughout, Silva’s short is ultimately too fragmented to give its lead character the resolution he deserves, and feels as though it gets off one stop too soon. Silva’s “Dance Dance Dance,” sadly not an allusion to the Haruki Murakami novel of the same name, punctures the invisible world of subway dancers by following one of them as he heads above ground and abruptly comes out to his hostile friends and family. By the time the story reaches its throat-catching conclusion, Wasikowska stands boldly on her own. Beginning with a shot of a new mother (Kathryn Beck) submerged in a tub of her own blood, Wasikowska spins a devious tale of postpartum depression run amok that alternately channels the likes of David Cronenberg and Roman Polanski. Wasikowska’s “Afterbirth” is a more cohesive and compelling entry, the actress building upon the auspicious short she previously contributed to “The Turning” in 2013. The story sinks from playful eroticism to hard-nosed drama as Kashyap plumbs deeper into the volatile tension that exists between Western mores and traditional values - as with most of the shorts in “Madly,” the segment overstays its welcome, but it nevertheless captures how love refuses to contain itself arbitrarily. Robinson, and convinces her to shave her bikini area. It’s all fun and games until the kid shows the Kim Kardashian sex tape to his would-be Mrs. A mustachioed virgin has developed a severe crush on his upstairs neighbor’s wife (Radhika Apte), and everyone in their conservative Indian apartment complex is buzzing about it. įirst up is Kashyap’s “Clean Shaven,” which is in reference to pubic hair (and not the Lodge Kerrigan film of the same-ish name). At one point or another, “Madly” visits several different shades of love, from the familial to the romantic to the forbidden to some wild combination of the three.
The rules are more flexible than in most omnibus films - rather than being tethered to any particular city or genre, these half-dozen storytellers are only required to operate within the confines of the world’s most abstract force. There’s no wraparound story to hold things together (unlike in the “V/H/S” films, for example), nor does there seem to be any rhyme or reason to the order in which they unspool if “Madly” can be thought of as a mixtape, we’re listening to it on shuffle. If not for the instruction provided by the film’s title, it might be difficult to trace the connective tissue that runs through these six disparate shorts. “Madly” may never be quite as exciting as the idea behind it, but that’s only because it’s one hell of an idea.Īs with most anthologies the whole is less than the sum of its parts, though it’s hard to say what the whole is here. Whatever the case, the beguiling confluence of voices he’s collected results in a refreshingly unpredictable experience. It’s hard to tell if this Avengers-like team was carefully curated for a reason or if Mahoney just threw a bunch of darts at the wall to see what might stick. Bat for Lashes) closes things out with a wedding day tale that feels like the cinematic adaptation of a song from her new album. Actor Gael García Bernal follows that with a wistful glimpse of a marriage destabilized by childbirth, and - most surprisingly of all - musician Natasha Khan (a.k.a. “Nasty Baby” director Sebastían Silva delivers a short that imagines the interior life of a NYC subway dancer (“Showtime!”), and legendary Japanese maverick Sion Sono responds with a shocking comedy about a family trip to a sex club. The collection of talent that producer Eric Mahoney has assembled for this loosely related anthology project is as diverse as it is unexpected: An erotic social drama from Indian auteur Anurag Kashyap (“Gangs of Wasseypur”) plows into a postpartum thriller directed by “Alice in Wonderland” star Mia Wasikowska. “Madly” is either the work of a true visionary or a shameless opportunist - those are the only conceivable explanations for an omnibus film that boasts a roster of directors so electrically strange and selective.