Erupcja

In “The Moment,” Charli XCX channeled Larry David for the TikTok generation. In the Polish American “Erupcja,” on the other hand, in her capacity as both co-star and co-writer, Charli XCX is reimagining “Serendipity.” Kate Beckinsale’s character in that 2001 romantic comedy believed that fate sent her signs and that how she read those signs determined her happiness. In director Pete Ohs’s “Erupcja,” every time Bethany (XCX) and her childhood Polish friend Nel (Lena Góra) reconvene after years apart, a volcano erupts, which they read as fate sending them a sign of their being soulmates. And if you can’t stop a volcano from erupting, only seek to contain the fallout, when Bethany and Nel reconvene in Warsaw at the same time Bethany’s boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) plans to propose, there might well be another chemical discharge but also emotional fallout to which they remain oblivious. That turns “Erupcja” into something not quite profound, perhaps, but with deeper knowledge than this genre typically allows, a diaphanous 71-minutes drama that manages to knock you over with a feather.

Every time Rob mentions Warsaw, he says, “Warsaw, Poland,” just like that, both city and country, as if he’s willing himself to be there, perhaps, but also determined to embrace it since it means so much to Bethany. It’s evocative of his unwitting sweet nature, even if that sweet nature proves no match for what his girlfriend feels with Nel. “The earth doesn’t shake,” Bethany explains of her relationship with Rob. “Volcanos don’t erupt.” These are sensations that Ohs brings to life on the soundtrack through rattling glasses and tableware, even luggage on the cobblestone streets, making it seem as if distant volcanic tremors are sending a warning on a frequency that not everyone can hear. Indeed, at breakfast, Rob gets a notification on his phone of a cancelled flight home: Italy’s Mount Etna has erupted. That’s the sign: Bethany essentially ghosts her would-be fiancé just as Nel inadvertently ghosts her ex-girlfriend Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska) just back in town. It’s not so much that the rest of the world can wait as it ceases to exist.

Among the most intriguing elements of “Erupcja” is that Bethany and Nel’s relationship is presented as platonic yet conveyed with the same sort of headlong rush typically associated with a physical relationship, suggesting that romantic soulmates exist in all manner of shapes and sizes. Ohs brings that connection to life less through traditional scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends than through aesthetic jolts of montage and music – eruptions, if you will. Such an approach is unsuitable to filling out backstory and so Ohs leaves the exposition to novel-like narration by Jacek Zubiel that in his wry tone suggests a kind of cheeky cultural anthropologist. Nel works at a flower shop, and through this narration we learn that she and Bethany met when the latter was buying flowers for herself, an action that can appear as self-care through one lens and narcissism through another.

Indeed, if there is self-evident selfishness to Bethany and Nel’s way of life, that is not glossed over but made clear. Nel’s American expat artist friend (Jeremy O. Harris) goes so far as to point out that, like, you know, “Volcanos kill people.” To Bethany and Nel, though, this concrete fact seems to go in one ear and out the other, making me think of the recent SNL sketch where in playing one real-life media influencer feuding with another real-life media influencer, Chloe Fineman described her character’s dispute as “worse than 9/11.” Another movie might also have written off Rob as collateral damage, but the denouement of “Erupcja” cedes the stage to him, imbuing a genuine sense of his confusion and dismay, as if Bridget Monyahan’s character had been given a say in “Serendipity.” And as the narrative gets handed off to him, Bethany recedes from view, her quasi-resolution mentioned in passing by the narrator as an afterthought. Before that happens, though, she delivers a monologue straight to the camera by reciting Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, which comes across like the most XCX touch of all. This poetry recitation is what passes for an explanation, like a celebrity apologizing via Instagram without apologizing for anything in particular.

Song of the Summer

Unlike last year, in which no clear-cut song of the summer emerged, the 2026 song of the summer appears cut and dried. As of me writing this, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has tied the record as the second-longest number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 at 19 weeks, a distinction of which it is more than worthy. Its indelible but easygoing hook rewards repeated listens and would sound as appropriate wafting out of a car window, drifting across a beach, or floating above a backyard deck on a warm night at dusk as it would leading a legion of two-steppers at a Lone Star honkytonk. Its lyrics exploit the innate infectiousness in getting to sing the names of places – Tennessee, Abilene, the Smoky Mountains, Memphis, Amarillo, and, of course, the titular capper that is accentuated with the preceding word that honors the regional dialect by dispensing with the g and flattening it. It’s a neat songwriting trick that Langley pulls because, in effect, “Choosin’ Texas” is a sad song, saying goodbye to a cowboy who is choosin’ Texas by choosin’ another gal even as you can sense 80,000 people in Cowboys Stadium singing along at a Langley show ratifying that choice. Who wouldn’t choose Texas? Even Langley’s wistful vocal is fessing up to that fact. It’s a helluva song, maybe even the song of the year, but it’s not the song of the summer.

I mean, the song of this summer, the summer of 2026? Hello, earth to human inhabitant. 2026 has been the summer of apocalyptic skies and smoky air, of torrential rain, melting glaciers, flash floods, insane heat waves, and the hottest month in U.S. history for the contiguous lower 48 states. It has been the summer of ICE and of VAR, of poisoned lettuce and Lake America. It has been the summer of the first-ever Forever War that has Already Been Won and of a reflecting pool as the improbable, indelible emblem of the shape of the United States on its 250th anniversary. Through that lens, I can understand why people would covet a timeless song of the summer more than a timely one, a song into which they can escape four minutes at a time. But then, looking reality in the eye and denying it is becoming America’s métier. “I don’t wanna know,” Wild Pink wryly sings in another song from this summer, “I keep my head down.” And though Charli XCX is a British citizen, not an American one, she does maintain a home in Los Angeles, and anyway, by this point, the pop star is nothing less than a true Global Citizen. And though the cover of her new album might feature Martin Scorsese, and though David Cronenberg might have a crucial cameo on the record’s closer, her song SS26 makes me think of John Carpenter’s “They Live”: it’s summer 2026 and Charli XCX is making us put on the sunglasses. 

More than any other season, the sensation associated with summer is a fleeting one, which Shakespeare wrote about in Sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and all that, and in SS26, XCX twists that fleetingness into something else. The title is short for Spring Summer 2026, establishing the context as utterly present tense, a pop song as IMF message from “Mission: Impossible” designed to self-destruct once we reach late September. Her verses and pre-chorus are a patchwork of familiar denials, deflections, and excuses that evoke a modern propensity for saying whatever one must to make it through whatever moment they are in and once they have, wiping their hands clean of it: “No, it’s not my fault / I wasn’t there.” And though Sonnet 18 argued that art is the only way to make something last, XCX is dubious of what that might mean to the people experiencing that art in the moment. SS26 itself is a testament to the value and pleasure of art even as it simultaneously ridicules music, fashion, and film as being unable to save us.

Indeed, in her video for 1999, she recreated the movie “Titanic,” but in the video for SS26, she virtually turns a fashion runway into the Titanic, dressed in her best and prepared to go down blinkered and beautiful. It might suggest a kind of release, yet in the song’s minimalist production and the way it repeatedly teases at shifting into a higher gear only to decline at the last minute, tapering out at the end, XCX impudently denies us the very catharsis we crave. Summer’s over! Now what?

 

The Moment

“The Moment” of Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary satire refers to the long tail of success from British pop artist Charli XCX’s sixth studio album “Brat” and the cultural phenomenon that it spawned, one colloquially known as Brat Summer. That phenomenon, however, and the album itself, are never really explored or even explained in detail. No, true to its title, “The Moment” picks up at the point where the artist’s original intent, whatever it was, has been co-opted by the culture at large and turned into something out of the artist’s control. And so, the questions “The Moment” asks are: when, exactly, does a pop culture craze end, and how does it end, and why does it end, and who ends it? These questions have been asked before but even so, Charli XCX, who conceived the story that Zamiri and Bertie Brandes turned into a script, finagles creatively meta ways to ask them. Indeed, the question of when Brat Summer will conclude is literally posed aloud by none other than Stephen Colbert in an ersatz Charli XCX interview on The Late Show. I LOL’d. 

If Charli (we will refer to the character as Charli and the actor as XCX) seems ready to let the moment end, the surrounding industry types seek ways to prolong it, creating a Brat credit card and urging her to do what music stars have done time immemorial and make a concert film. In essence, that’s what “The Moment” is, the making of the making of the concert film as clueless handlers hire a director (Alexander Skarsgård) who cultivates an air of collaboration and openness while simultaneously practicing neither, seeking to transform Brat into a version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. No doubt this stems in part from the real-world tension between XCX and TayTay, but it is, nevertheless, hilarious to see Charli throwing herself on the mercy of the industry machine by dangling from a stationary harness.

The format might draw from “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), but the titular band in the mockumentary godfather was all about delusions of grandeur while Charli is wracked with exhaustion and self-loathing and seeks to sabotage her own concert movie. That suggests “This Is Spinal Tap” less than the mockumentary styled “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO pilot as do Charli’s comically cringe encounters with various people that drop in and out of her orbit. XCX effuses nimble comic timing and a genuine skill at deadpan in these moments, like the one on her tour bus where she hesitantly peers around a corner to reluctantly allow the driver to drop some ostensible knowledge, evincing celebrity as forever walking on eggshells rather than living among the clouds. If I were writing a Letterboxd review of “The Moment” I might just write that Charli XCX gives the performance of the year as Larry David. She’s a misanthrope for the TikTok generation.

I know, I know. Letterboxd, TikTok, Brat, Charli XCX, what is any of this in the first place? And that’s the thing about “The Moment”: it fails to offer any entry point for anyone who is not completely plugged into current pop culture unless you are the rare middle-aged dude such as myself who happens to totally be into Charli XCX. (I was the oldest person in the theater at my showing.) Likewise, a non-Charli’s Angel might watch “The Moment” and come away thinking, “Well, who is Charli XCX?” Adhering to narrative rules that we get to know the character before the character loses all sense of herself would yield a more powerful closing punch, no? Except the point of XCX’s shape-shifting persona has always been obfuscation of the person, and even more than that, an awesome defiance of the fan service that has come to define so much of modern pop culture. That’s one of the reasons I admire her artistry so much. And if the extreme close-ups of Charli throughout “The Moment” evoke a desperate desire for the camera to peel away the persona, she pushes back at every turn, brought home in a dizzying denouement where she might as well put “Brat” in a burn barrel out back, pour some gasoline on it, and light a match.