Madonna Premieres Surrealistic, NSFW ‘Confessions II’ Short Film at Tribeca: ‘It’s About Connection’

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Lasers shoot out of private parts, Benedict Cumberbatch's dancing earns Madonna's respect, the artist "might be" touring and other revelations from her conversation with Anderson Cooper

Here’s what the Tribeca Film Fest organizers told Madonna fans to expect at the Friday night premiere of her Confessions II: It’s “an ambitious visual work exceeding 10 minutes, built around the first six tracks of Madonna‘s forthcoming album.” This is what they ended up seeing: a surrealistic polyptych of women with lasers shooting out of their private parts, Benedict Cumberbatch voguing in a bathroom, and Madonna in all her various personae, from vulnerable, lonely songwriter to you-can-dance-on-a-moving-table contortionist.

And in addition to Madonna, the short featured 16 celebrity cameos, including Sabrina Carpenter, Feid, Debi Mazar, Kate Moss, Julia Garner, Odessa A’zion, Richard E. Grant, Honey Dijon, and Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon, among others, in its 13-minute runtime. With so much stunning imagery and samples of songs from Madonna’s upcoming Confessions II, a sequel of sorts to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor due July 3, including “I Feel So Free” and “Bring Your Love,” the film made the long wait to see it that evening, since attendees’ phones locked in Yondr cases for up to two-and-a-half hours from when doors opened, worth it. (The rest of the world still has to wait until Monday to see the film on YouTube.)

But then of course there was Madonna herself. Twenty-six or so hours removed from a Times Square performance that literally stopped traffic, the artist, 67, entered New York’s Beacon Theatre from doors stage right wearing a big white, feathery coat, a sparkly dress, and dark sunglasses and followed by photographers’ flashbulbs until she found her seat. After the film ended with Lourdes Leon saying, “Cut, bitch,” and the credits rolled, Madonna wended her way to the stage for a Q&A alongside the film’s directors, David Toro and Solomon Chase, aka TORSO, that Anderson Cooper moderated since the original host, Jimmy Fallon, was inexplicably unavailable. Now this was what people paid to see.

For 45 minutes, Madonna spoke candidly and volubly about a wide variety of subjects: her disdain for cell phones, which, she says, keep folks from connecting with one another (“everybody [at Coachella] had their phones up [and] I didn’t know what anyone looked like”); her memories of discovering gay clubs around Detroit (“everyone was free”); feeling out-of-place in New York, so she’d read F. Scott Fitzgerald (“not The Great Gatsby“) at clubs; recollections of making out with Mazar “just to attract boys”; the physical demands of performing live and any number of deflections of Cooper’s questions about an upcoming tour (“There might be [one]”); and, of course, the film, which she assured everyone wasn’t a music video.

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“I like the idea of film, because I’m a ‘film-phile,’ a cinephile, and film has inspired a good part of my life,” she said, before channeling her inner Norma Desmond: “Somehow [the word] video seems cheap. It was good when it was just MTV and me.”

And while the film bore all the hallmarks of a big splashy Madonna music video, right down to highly sexual imagery that the prudes at MTV would’ve banned, it also felt like something unique, neither a clip nor a short film, but a let’s-get-unconscious freaky bedtime story. The previously unreleased songs (“Good for the Soul,” “One Step Away,” “Danceteria,” and “Read My Lips”) throbbed with the same easily danceable rhythms as the singles, and everything blended together into a fever dream. “I’m a storyteller, so, emotion journey, storytelling, and [TORSO are] from another planet and they think [about] environment and visual dopamine-firing.”

It opens with Madonna alone in a room as lingerie-clad women chase her with cameras, until suddenly she’s in a forest and a white light is shining out of her crotch … which then cut to green lasers peering out of spinning spread-eagled women’s vaginas and the butts of doggystyle people. “I really have to give credit to these guys in terms of visuals for each environment,” Madonna said, nodding to the TORSO directors. “Specifically, I never would have imagined lasers coming out of girls’ pussies. Honestly, I really wanted to try it, but apparently, you get quite hot.”

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There’s a gay club in the film where Madonna and Carpenter sing, and Garner dances, the bathroom where she makes out with men she plucks from urinals (and Mazar and Cumberbatch dance), Feid in a mirror, black latex-wrapped BDSM women eating bananas, and Lourdes Leon, who received the biggest cheers of all the cameos from the Beacon audience, closing things out.

“I did think about asking her in the beginning [to do the film] but she really turns everything down that has to do with me,” Madonna said. “We wrote a song together that’s on my record. It’s called ‘The Test.’ It’s beautiful. We wrote it in the studio at the same time, and it was sort of a healing moment between us.

“I’m really proud of her,” she continued. “She’s so immensely talented, way more talented than I am. I’m not saying that because I’m her mom.”

The film took six months to make, since they filmed it in London, L.A. and New York, and it was part of the year-and-a-half Madonna spent on the Confessions II album. The artist said she decided to make a dance album as a distraction from waiting for films and series projects she was working on to materialize. All of the songs on the LP, she said, blend together. “The record itself is one long-playing story,” she said. “We wanted to make the record something you could put on to dance with from start to end, something that would take you on a journey. Towards the end it gets a little bit more thoughtful, emotional, and intimate.”

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Ultimately, though, it’s about how the music moves you, physically and metaphysically. “I don’t want to make mindless music,” she said. “I want to make music that’s about something. Dance music makes you move your body, and you feel the pulse. It’s, like, you’re connecting to the universe, you’re connecting to other humans.”

And connection is what Madonna is all about right now. “The movie’s really about connection,” she said. “I emerge from my solitude of this apartment and go right into a forest with people with lasers coming out of their asses. You just really go through life, take risks, be curious, be observant. … And put your fucking phones down and connect.”