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The early 1990s were underway and Miss Ciccone, at the top for almost a decade, decreed the dismissal of frivolous and harmless games from the eighties. Lace and frills were banned, the wedding dresses and the flamboyant outfits of Like a Virgin were mothballed, and the chic blonde sheen of True Blue was sacrificed. Madonna steered an already brilliant career towards more "serious" and "intimate" artistic-creative modes: thus began the second tranche of the Madonna’s thirty-year career, better known as the sex phase. A few, but decisive years, in which this Italian-American mixed religious mysticism - Christian and very private sexual fantasies, shamelessly emphasized to the maximum with the coffee book Sex and the album Erotica. From as far back as 1989, at least until the threshold of Evita and Ray Of Light, Madonna skillfully accumulated scandals upon scandals, criticisms, and skepticism: it was during this period that she, having become a skillful marketing strategist, conceived a clever combination of music and visual art unusual at that time.
The favorite recipients of this "mission" were the tours. Miss Ciccone was no longer content to present her hits live with only playful dance steps and colorful optical effects: the show necessarily had to transform into a stunning work of art for worldwide export, composed of music, scenery, costumes, dancers, backing singers, hoists, elevators... in short, an orgy of fun and excitement aimed at overturning the meaning of "concert."
"In Bed With Madonna" (Truth Or Dare) represents a sort of "reality show" of the famous Blond Ambition Tour which in 1990 ignited the major cities of the earth: claimed by the artist herself and with filming entrusted to Alek Keshishian, the feature film intends to reveal Ciccone's adventure and her staff wandering around the globe, through repeated ups and downs from stages and private jets heading to sold-out sports halls and stadiums.
Alternating black & white for moments of conviviality offstage and color for live performance fragments, Keshishian and cameramen follow the transgressive performer like puppies in her amazing adventures, being meticulous even at less opportune moments. We thus see Madonna violently angry with her collaborators for audio-technical difficulties, soaking herself like a biscuit during the rainy season in Japan, comforting her dancers with prayers just before the show. The footage, however, goes well beyond the usual concert routine, with the pretext of highlighting a totally unseen Madonna far from the dominant stereotypes: boldness mixed with a veil of fear is noticed when she risks arrest in Canada for "indecent acts in public" (namely the mimed masturbation of the song Like a Virgin), outrage at the Vatican's attempts (somewhat successful) to boycott the Italian shows, and finally, the visit to her mother's grave (a scene made even more poignant by the piano-voice ballad Promise to Try in the background), during which she crouches down, perhaps a bit grotesquely, next to her tombstone.
What gives the documentary its salient characteristics of a comedy is the unique relationship established with the dancers: among simulations of oral sex achieved through a bottle, the singer's "commands" to publicly showcase the dancers' attributes, and spicy/uninhibited hotel conversations, it seems the tour is actually a non-stop party, a sort of frenetic carousel of laughter and enthusiasm (even though there are a few unpleasant situations like the teasing thrown at the only heterosexual dancer by his gay colleagues). These scenes highlight a Madonna terribly shrewd in business and damnably strict with herself, yet gentle, sweet, even fragile with her staff (individual collaborators also recount their life episodes before the camera, as in the case of the drugged and mistreated makeup artist at a club). Noteworthy, finally, are the VIP appearances: boyfriend and director Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, also the complete Ciccone family (with the alcoholic brother Martin, the winemaker father Silvio "Tony" and stepmother Joanne).
A irreverent, desecrating, and provocative work, perhaps the best example of Madonna's "on the road" life, in which songs, beds, hotels, cities, conical-cup bustiers, strobe lights, and gigantic stages mix into an unrepeatable unity of joy, fiction, and reality, dramas and mini-stories, each to be told and expanded with the "magnifying glass" of the ineffable camera ever lurking.
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