By Josh Bonador
Preparing to pen thoughts on The Moment, the new film by Charli XCX, I intended to open up with a definition of brat and paint a pretty picture of the zeitgeist circa June 2024. But why bother? You lived it! I know you did! Your mother’s dog’s girlfriend lived it! You’re reading this on Standing Room Magazine via Instagram link, you were surely tapped in. Even Kamala Harris was tapped in for heaven’s sake.
Regardless, for the liars out there, I’ll rewind for a second: Lime green was chic, Von Dutch was on repeat 24/7 and you’d stand behind people in queues spotting the time displayed on their phone in low-resolution Arial font. The brat summer became a world recognised cultural phenomenon that unified wildly different camps and pulled them all into Charli XCX’s nightclub. From online music nerd cave dwellers who evangelised her 2016 project Vroom Vroom to the entire queer community to damn near every twenty-or-thirty-something alive, the world was obsessed with brat. Now Charli XCX, with collaborator Aidan Zamiri on directorial duties, is ready to usher in the sunset with The Moment.
Told through the lens of a satirical mockumentary, The Moment sees Charli XCX play a fictionalised version of herself during the tail-end of brat summer as she attempts to cram rehearsals, brand promotions, me-time and the filming of a concert film mere weeks before the brat arena tour. The film feels reminiscent of a Safdie brothers thriller as Charli’s steadily declining mental health is pushed to centrestage, complete with voyeuristic handheld camera angles against a pulsing but contemplative soundtrack scored not by Daniel Lopatin, but by brat’s executive producer A.G Cook.
Funnily enough, the music of brat doesn’t really make much of an appearance barring some pivotal scenes, but instead Charli’s story is soundtracked by filthy four-to-the-floor beats and tender synth drones. It’s a sonic aesthetic that mirrors the nightclub experience with original tracks like Removal and Dread perfectly capturing the feeling of stumbling home during a 5 a.m. sunrise, ears ringing and the strange sensation of being in freefall once you collapse into bed.
“It’s supposed to feel like a nightclub” demands Charli’s creative director and friend Celeste, played by Hailey Benton Gates, as creative differences brew with “ick”-personified and concert film director Johannes Godwin with a fantastic love-to-hate performance by Alexander Skarsgård. In a film stacked with exaggerated caricatures of “”real”” people, Skarsgård fully commits with chewing, no gorging on the scenery, at every opportunity and delivers a performance I can’t help but praise through slightly gritted teeth. Conversely, Gates acts as the voice of reason for Charli, remaining unwaveringly loyal to her as everyone ruthlessly seeks a piece of her. The friction between the two creative forces generates most of the film’s genuine tension, and the roles of each character become increasingly clear to Charli: the zombified prolonging of brat summer via Johannes and his commercial concert film or the definitive end of a golden era via Celeste’s steadfast pursuit of creative integrity.
On the acting front, Charli genuinely knocks it out of the park despite the script’s demands of that she appear dumbstruck or flustered at every corporate-driven decision presented to her be it, a new brat Magnum flavour, the idea of a queer-people-only bank account or, perhaps most egregious, capitalising the B in brat (gasp!) While it’s clear she’s mostly the butt-end of the joke for much of the film’s runtime, Charli’s unfiltered sincerity juxtaposed against everyone else’s idiocy make genuine laughs, even if we slowly watch the stress manifest across her face.
Easily the crowning jewel of the film is its end sequence where the true intent behind Charli’s decision to make this project becomes clear. With tongue-bursting-through-cheek humour, I couldn’t help but be totally impressed with what she’s achieved artistically with this film, especially when the last time we saw a pop artist attempt something remotely similar we got The Weeknd’s utterly masturbatory Hurry Up Tomorrow. The Moment ultimately sees Charli XCX choose to let brat be a flash in the pan and not have its reanimated corpse desperately clinging to relevancy. It’s being comfortable with whatever her loyal fans want it to be, relinquishing control, but never letting you forget that she’s still quietly in the driver’s seat.
