The Moment (dir. Aidan Zamiri)
Listen, I know I am not the target audience for a faux-documentary in which Charli XCX plays herself, so fans should take my words with a grain of salt. Full disclosure: Before seeing this movie my only knowledge of the musician was the simple fact that she exists. I do remember there being a line outside of my local record store when Brat was first released, and it consisted solely of people who were not alive during 9/11. I also remember “Brat summer” being a thing, but I still don’t really know what it means beyond “this is the summer that Brat was released.”
Nonetheless, I am not so out of the loop to be unaware that Ms. XCX is having a moment, and it’s the moment that all pop-stars simultaneously dream of and dread. If all goes to plan, indelible superstardom is inevitable. But if one thing goes wrong, and the notoriously finicky group of people called “the fanbase” smells blood, the ensuing fall can prove to be even swifter and more chaotic than the initial rise. It’s a tale as old as celebrity, and really, there’s only so much that the object of said fame can do. The people around her, however, must walk the thinnest of tightropes, keeping lightning trapped in a bottle, lest their pet artist crumble and their own income disappear in the process.
So goes the story of The Moment, which chronicles a fictionalized period of Brat summer in which XCX’s handlers hope to extend the summer tour into a full on Brat Year. Charli has her own vision for things, but when art clashes with commerce, and a famed music video director (a hilariously clueless Alexander Skarsgård) is brought in to film the tour for the big screen, the singer’s iconic rough edges are threatened with an unwanted smoothing.
I emerged from the film with a respect for and interest in Charli XCX as an artist. The adept ways she takes the piss out of herself and her chosen industry is often clever, and decidedly no-holds-barred, even if it leads to an unoriginal, painfully didactic ending. XCX’s self-awareness does a lot of the leg work here, and it indicates to me, a new fan, exactly why her star is on the rise: the kids want something “real” in their pop music, just like every generation before them. Charli XCX is not the bottle blonde, six-packed Barbie doll of my generation’s pop princesses. No, she comes across as a normal young woman. She’s undeniably attractive, but in a more relatable way. She smokes, she drinks, she curses, and she has a sexuality that doesn’t feel manufactured, even if this faux-documentary feels extremely manufactured.
To that end, I think an actual documentary would’ve been much more interesting. It could’ve shown us the actual struggle of superstardom instead of weakly satirizing it and then explaining the satire outright. I get the sense that XCX would be just as honest and open in such a format, and frankly, the comedy that emerges from The Moment isn’t funny or consistent enough to merit the low-key Spinal Tap treatment.
And finally, a personal bugaboo that I will never stop screaming about from my old man mountain: it’s okay to use documentary style filmmaking as an aesthetic. Curb Your Enthusiasm does it flawlessly.
BUT. BUT. BUT.
BUUUUUUUUT the second a character on screen acknowledges the camera, the filmmakers must then account for every camera. And here in the time of Parks and Recreation and Abbott Elementary, there’s just no consistency to this overused and wildly abused framing device, and it dries me absolutely insane. Maybe it’s because I love found footage. Maybe it’s because I love documentaries. Whatever it is, this breach of cinematic language leads to a complete break with the established reality, unless I am to believe that the “documentary” was shot by a team of teleporting, psychic camera operators who can make themselves invisible on cue.
“Wuthering Heights” (dir. Emerald Fennell)
The second half of Charli XCX weekend comes in the form of Emerald Fennell’s loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights, featuring new original songs from the star. It’s a good showing for the musician, as well as for Fennell’s craft as a visualist. The script, however, needs a lot of work.
Now to be fair, every male filmmaker gets a passion project that he’s way too close to, and thus manages to whiff, so I see no reason why Fennell can’t have one too, and like her male counterparts, major points for ambition and style are due. There’s something inherently interesting and clever about mining a literary classic for drugstore romance novel elements and then centering those elements as aggressively as possible, but every time this messy, uncharacteristically bland script flirts with committing to a compelling path, it immediately pivots away from it, content to tread water for a bit before circling and then abandoning a different potentially interesting path. I frequently found myself thinking “ohhh okay, I know what they’re going for here, this should be cool” only to quickly find that no, the script was not going for it … nor much of anything.
Brontë’s novel (which, full disclosure, I didn’t really enjoy) is much too complex and dense for a direct adaptation, which is why just about every prior adaptation only covers the front half of the story. This is fine by me. I’m way too big a fan of The Shining, Jaws, The Box, and Jurassic Park to give a hoot about adherence to the source material, so I applaud that this adaptation is trying to do something new. Simplifying the story and leaning into the notion that these two lovers “love” each other so hard that they can’t help but create a whirlwind of self-destruction is exactly what I want from a period anti-romance. Yet that melodramatic fire is missing on every front. Robbie and Elordi can’t help but to make a physically attractive couple, but they are passionless despite frequently stating otherwise. These are supposed to be despicable, selfish, horny people. We are supposed to revel in their cruelty while feeing challenged by it, but instead they’re just annoying. They’re that couple on social who constantly post lovey-dovey shit even though it’s clear that they kinda hate each other.
At the midpoint of the film, Elordi’s Heathcliff straight up tells Robbie’s Cathy that he’s going to make it his life’s mission to destroy himself an take her along with him since he cannot have her as a wife. My immediate thought was “awesome, this movie is finally about to get rocking.”
But then it doesn’t get rocking. Our leads don’t commit to mutual destruction in any compelling way. They just kinda glare at each other here and there, sometimes in a field. It’s weird and boring. You promised Victorian Jerry Springer. GIVE ME VICTORIAN JERRY SPRINGER.
I run into a similar issue with this film as I did with Babylon (a film I ultimately loved, despite its flaws). Namely that the creator isn’t as attuned to perversity/filth/kink/grime as they seem to think. Much like when Chazelle’s tale of Hollywood excess went into the underworld to find an oddly sanitary den of freaks, Fennell’s wannabe smut novelization comes across as strikingly vanilla. In the case of the former, the decidedly unseedy seediness was one small part of the film, but with the latter, it’s the whole thing, and without it there’s nothing.
Added note: it should be against the law to hire Hong Chau and underuse her to this degree.
