Review of ‘Erupcja’, Charli xcx’s big screen debut
It is, indeed, the year to proselytize Charli xcx. With the still fresh launch of “Music, Fashion, Film” (26), the British debuts with solvency for the big screen and under the orders of Pete Ohs with one of those sensibly existentialist titles, with a photochemical texture and bohemian bourgeoisie on the payroll, where the true movement is not so much narrative as emotional. “Erupcja” It finds much of its meaning in the strange and almost mythological correspondence between the bond between Nel (Lena Góra) and Bethany (Charli) and the volcanic activity of the planet: each reunion between the two friends seems to bring with it the eruption of a volcano somewhere on the globe.
However, Ohs and the story itself will gradually bring down to earth that apparently metaphysical bond with the folds, reservations and concerns of their respective protagonists, or at least, as much as their seventy-one minutes of footage allow. As if they were two sides of the same coin, we will see represented in their actions two opposite ways of facing the arbitrariness of destiny: the first, although with as many questions as the second, assumes the consequences of their actions, recognizes what gives them well-being and abandons their pride so as not to give up a happiness that they sense is possible; the second, on the contrary, advocates preserving fiction in its present, trapped between the life it has and the one it constantly imagines it could have had.
The collateral damage of this conflict will be Rob (Will Madden), a boyfriend as “perfect as he is boring” who she will end up finding on the lonely streets of Warsaw and forcibly hanging the answers to Bethany’s complacent acquiescence. And as soon as the couple sets foot in the romantic Polish capital, tourist apartment through, all the brokenness of their relationship, which until now remained buried in a model coexistence, begin to come to light and put their union in check at the most inopportune moment. The earth definitely doesn’t shake with him like it does with Nel.
More than a film of great revelations, what “Erupcja” achieves with its intimate delicacy is to put on the table a repertoire of generationally recognizable feelings that, to a greater or lesser extent, challenge anyone: from the longing for a recurring fantasy that perhaps only exists in some idealized corner of our memory to that very contemporary impulse to escape without there necessarily being a genuine place to reach. Chaos, understood here as a parenthesis, before returning to the conformity that was initially intended to be abandoned.
Ohs, coming from the independent circuit and with extensive experience in the language of the video clip, takes great care of the packaging, aware of the charm of loss and erratic drift: he refines his forms, trusts in the verb of Lord Byron to condense the foundation of the story, and expands the inner world of his characters from the poetics of insignificance, totally typical of the Nouvelle Vague (and bequeathed here to a meticulous voice-over that reserves a central role for dreams). Oblivious to all stridency and attentive to minutiae, the fact that this particular eruption ends where it all began perhaps hides, in its apparent lack of direction, the long-awaited secret to taming the poison of expectation.
