Ben Beaumont-Thomas 

Madonna to return to film directing with Adé: A Love Story

Pop legend will direct Africa-set romance adapted from the novel by Rebecca Walker, daughter of Color Purple author Alice• Remind yourself of Madonna's last effort behind the camera
  
  

Madonna
New material girl … Madonna will return to directing with Adé: A Love Story. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Despite the critical and commercial failure of her last directorial effort, W.E., Madonna is to return to film directing with Adé: A Love Story, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Rebecca Walker.

Walker, the daughter of The Color Purple author Alice Walker, published the novel last year. It concerns a pair of US students travelling in Kenya, one of whom falls in love with a local man, Adé – she adopts an Arabic name, and tries to adjust to a new life in unfamiliar surroundings, before encountering cultural friction as the pair try to visit the US. Armchair psychologists might point to parallels with Madonna's life: the singer moved to the UK to live with film-maker husband Guy Ritchie, before the pair later divorced. She's also explored tropical romance before in her film with Ritchie, Swept Away.

The film will be produced by Bruce Cohen, one of the producers of the successful David O Russell film Silver Linings Playbook, and a screenwriter is being sought to adapt the novel. It will be Madonna's third film, following Filth and Wisdom in 2008, and W.E. in 2011, which explored the life of Wallis Simpson alongside that of a contemporary researcher delving into the truth of Simpson's romance with King Edward VIII.

The film was panned by critics – the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called it "one long humourless and necrophiliac swoon at the Windsors' supposed tragi-romantic glamour" – and made less than a million dollars worldwide at the box office.

At 55, Madonna remains the hyphenate cultural megastar she's always been. As well as her long-form film projects, she also released a short film through BitTorrent last year called secretprojectrevolution. She released her most recent album MDNA in 2012, and its subsequent world tour helped position her as the highest-earning musician in 2013, according to Forbes. In February she announced, at the opening of a new gym in her chain Hard Candy Fitness, that she's begun discussing a new record with writers and producers. She performed an emotional rendition of Open Your Heart at this year's Grammy awards as 33 couples were wed onstage during a performance by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and also guested on Miley Cyrus's MTV Unplugged set.

Last week she launched her skincare range MDNA Skin in Japan with a borderline self-parodic promotional video below, which harks back to the monochrome raunch of her early 90s Sex period as she intones: "Having good skin is important to me. But so are other things – like creation."

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• Read Xan Brooks's one star review of W.E. from Venice

 

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