by Julian Wood
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Charli XCX, Rachel Sennott, Alexander Skarsgård, Rosanna Arquette
Intro:
If you are in on the joke, then the whole rollercoaster ride is a lot of fun.
If you are really talented, and you know you are really talented, and everyone else knows you are really talented, is it okay to tell everyone how talented you are? The postmodernists were right! Oh, and the immediate part has to recycle endlessly, so that nothing can ever be non-referential again. This film is a bit exhausting but very zeitgeisty at the same time.
British posh party-girl, club banger, Y2K pop diva (etc. etc.) Charli XCX is certainly part of the ‘moment’. In fact, she has helped/is helping to define it. She exploded into the scene a decade or more ago. Then she kept pushing boundaries and, with each album that ‘dropped’, she acquired more lustre and more critical attention and more need to run away from it all. You get the feeling that the expectational pressure that accompanies this much fame and success must be pretty intense.
This layered, weird but rather wonderful mockumentary keeps playing with these various tensions. Charli plays herself getting ready to move on to the next big ‘promotional thing’ to accompany her mega hit 2024 album Brat.
She has no end of hangers-on and agents and so on, who divide their time between shielding her and exposing her further to make money out of her. This is a very long gravy train. She herself wants to keep in the public eye but not at the expense of her sanity or her future creativity. When a powerful music biz mover and shaker Tammy (the wonderful Rosanna Arquette) suggests that her upcoming concert should be filmed/steered by egotistical ‘genius’ filmmaker Johannes (Alexander Skarsgard having a ball here), Charli nearly loses her excrement. Skipping off to Ibiza in the crucial rehearsal period does nothing to keep things smooth.
Director Aidan Zamiri has assembled a great cast who are all in on the joke. The mockumentary is an ideal form, it allows for a very lose shooting style and, by all accounts, the set was as chaotic as it was meant to be. When things go wrong, they go right for the film in a way, so we are in an upside-down world again. The ‘real Charli’ comes across as genuine whilst being fully aware that trying to be genuine in forced circumstances can’t ever be genuine. She is also used to people sticking cameras in her face and getting sycophantic and hysterical around her, and she knows it is all a circus. She tells a friend that, one day, she hopes for a normal life, and we kind of hope that she gets the chance to make that happen.
If you are in on the joke, then the whole rollercoaster ride is a lot of fun. Of course, it isn’t actually a concert film, so it can’t really showcase much of Charli in action, or show us what made her such a phenomenon in the first place. However, ninety-per cent of the audience that will seek out this much-anticipated movie already knows that she is a once in a generation talent. And the rest can fuck off.
