After The Afterparty

My thoughts on The Moment

By now, it has become almost a ritual for a musical act to conclude the sales period of a current hit album—I believe the kids today refer to them as “eras”—with a concert film that will serve to bridge the gap while they figure out what to do next and, perhaps more importantly, bring in additional revenue as well via album and video sales, downloads and streaming deals. However, it is clear that British pop star Charli XCX, having finally broken through into the mainstream in a big way with her smash hit album Brat, which would dominate both the airwaves and the cultural conversation from the moment when it was released in 2024, had zero interest in going down that path. Considering the amount of artistic and commercial success that she has had up to this point by following her instincts, I can’t really argue with that decision. The trouble is that what she and director/longtime collaborator Aidan Zamiri have come up with instead, the pseudo-documentary The Moment, is a rambling and unfocused work that has plenty of ambitious ideas behind it but no clear idea of how to execute them. This is a film that theoretically wants to skewer all aspects of the pop music industry from an insider’s perspective but which ultimately proves to be little more than Spice World with more cocaine and better tunes.

The film opens in September of 2024, with the period known as Brat Summer coming to its inevitable end, though it is clear that everyone from Charli’s fans to the weasels at her record company would like to extend it indefinitely by any means necessary. For the moment, Charli is preparing the final leg of her already successful tour with her good friend and creative director, Celeste (Hailey Gates) and has agreed to document those shows in a concert film for Amazon Prime. To direct the film, everyone insists that she use Johannes (Alexander Skarsgard), an oddball Swedish filmmaker who was not one of the people that she had been considering but whose credits include a number of successful concert films and allegedly inventing The Masked Singer. Figuring that all he will be doing is simply documenting the already-established show, Charli agrees to hire him but from the moment he arrives with his entourage to her first rehearsal, he begins to offer suggestions of how to “improve” the show.

The problem is that Johannes, evidently unfamiliar with Charli or her work (“Is she really singing about cocaine or just metaphorically?”), is convinced that removing all the edgy elements currently on display, from the deliberately harsh strobe lighting to Charli’s cheerfully snarky attitude to the songs themselves, and making it into a more overtly family-friendly experience will help increase both sales and the whole Brat experience. Essentially, he wants to turn the show into the kind of glossy spectacle not unlike those put on by the likes of Taylor Swift or Katy Perry—an approach that makes sense if you are Taylor Swift or Katy Perry but which is completely antithetical to everything Charli represents. This leads to increased tensions between Johannes and Celeste as the former slowly begins to take over the production but the twist is that Charli, who is already feeling somewhat unsure about her current success and where she can go from there, essentially bows to the pressure to go down the more blatantly commercial path and before long, the show has been fully transformed into a garish spectacle that couldn’t be less Brat if it tried with the celebration of edgy attitude replaced with cheesy gimmicks and squirm-inducing moments where she “spontaneously” addresses the crowd in patently insincere fashion.

Having already given viewers an inside look at how the pop music sausage is made in Charli XCX: Alone Together, the incisive and fascinating 2021 documentary that observed her writing and producing an entire album in a self-imposed 40 day period while stuck at home during COVID, The Moment presumably wants to show them, via a satirical prism, what happens once that sausage gets put out into the world and millions of people decide that it is pretty tasty. The problem is that the film has no real idea of what it wants to say about those ideas or how to present them. The film starts off in fully satirical mode as it chronicles Charli’s newfound fame and contain some very funny moments—at one point, she participates in a meet & greet where fans attempt to tell her how much her music means to them while handlers hustle them along—that work because they have an authenticity to them. However, once the conflict regarding the concert film kicks in, things get a lot shakier. If the film had been made in a pre-Brat time, seeing her struggle with the conflict between remaining true to her vision and finally breaking through to superstardom might have had some bite and weight to it. By setting it after she has already accomplished so much her own way, the conceit doesn’t really make sense and winds up undermining any legitimate points that she and Zamiri might have hoped to make. Then, to make matters worse, it more or less abandons whatever satirical perspective it has in the final third to shift into allegedly earnest sincerity as Charli comes clean about her insecurities that never rings true for a moment.

Since the central premise, at least as presented, is not nearly enough to stand the test of the 103-minute running time, the film throws in any number of additional elements with varying degrees of success. The film attempts to deploy the overly hyped sensibility that Charli XCX has displayed in her concerts and videos—rapid-fire editing, randomly flashing title cards, strobe lighting effect and such—and while it works at first, it not only grows wearisome as the film goes on, it has the unintended effect of suggesting that perhaps Johannes was not entirely off-base in regards to his suggestions. There are a few narrative sidetracks that eat up time but don’t really add much—there is an impulsive trip to Ibiza that doesn’t really click and a subplot over a Brat-branded credit card gimmick that threatens to become a financial disaster that sounds like a funny idea but never quite clicks. Perhaps the most frustrating element to be had is Skarsgard’s performance, which rehashes every old joke you have ever seen or heard bout weirdo foreign filmmakers while coming across like Jim Carrey in one of his lesser films in a turn that drags the film to a halt every time he appears. Put it this way—Kylie Jenner turns up in a cameo as herself and she is funnier in her brief turn than Skarsgard ever manages and I am not entirely sure that she was even trying to be funny in the first place.

For those who are not already fully indoctrinated in all things Charli XCX, The Moment is liable to come across like an increasingly baffling in-joke that makes no effort to include them in. However, even confirmed fans (and I do place myself in that category) are likely to find this to be a bit of a slog. While she has an undeniably intriguing presence that suggests that she could make the transition from the concert stage to movie screens, she doesn’t quite have the chops yet to save weak material of the kind she is working with here. In the end, the film is little more than a decisive Viking funeral for the Brat period but, like most Viking funerals, once it lights things up, it doesn’t really have anywhere to go.