How Can I Not Know What I Need Right Now
My thoughts on The Christophers and Erupcja
From well-known titles such as Out of Sight, Logan Lucky and his three Ocean’s Eleven films to more obscure works like The Underneath and No Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh is clearly one of the top people around when it comes to films revolving around heists and while his latest take on the genre, The Christophers, may not contain the kind of slick thrills found in some of those previous efforts, it nevertheless proves to be an enormously engaging and entertaining one despite its comparatively low-fi approach. The film stars Michaela Coel as Lori Butler, a once-promising artist who, following an embarrassing incident, abandoned that path in order to work as an art restorer (albeit one who also works in a food truck to pay the bills) who is contacted by Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), a pair of siblings who are the children of Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan), the once-renowned and now-retired painter who now fills his days drinking, recording Cameo greetings for fans and refusing demands from both the public and his children to complete the final set of paintings of a renowned series known as The Christophers that have languished unfinished and unseen in his locked storage room since the 90s. They have concocted a plan in which Lori will get herself hired as Julian’s new assistant, sneak up into the room and complete the paintings following his style so that they can be found after his seemingly imminent death and sold for millions. Although resistant at first, Lori has a certain history with Julian that convinces her to do it. As for Julian, he does hire her but quickly catches on that something is off and, assuming that it has to do with his greedy kids and The Christophers, demands that she destroy the canvases before his eyes in the backyard fire pit.
What I have described covers roughly the first half-hour of The Christophers and I will say no more to preserve most of the surprises in store in Ed Solomon’s smart and clever screenplay. That said, this is not a movie that necessarily lives or dies on the strength of its narrative twists and turns as much as it does on its sly wit, some deftly handled commentary on our culture’s ever-increasing commodification of art and the sight of two undeniably intriguing characters who, despite their overt differences in race, class and age—not to mention a shared past that only one seems to recall at first—nevertheless manage to find some kind of common ground on certain subjects, such as their thoughts about the artistic process and their attitudes towards Julian’s hilariously loathsome kids. The performances from the two leads are more than up to the task—McKellan is a hoot as the irascible artist who now finds himself a prisoner of both his past artistic legacy and current state of infamy and while Coel has the less overtly showy role (as is the case with her other film of the moment, Mother Mary) she more than holds her own throughout as well—and the supporting turns are so keenly detailed that even someone as normally odious as James Corden manages to snag a few laughs along the way.
For his part, Soderbergh is content to present the material in a fairly straightforward style while still lending the proceedings a striking look that is more impressive when you consider that the vast majority of the story takes place within the confines of Julian’s ramshackle neighboring townhouses. At this point in his career, Soderbergh has made so many films (this is the 11th feature than he has done since calling a halt to his self-proclaimed retirement in 2017) that there may be the tendency among some to not always give them the due that they deserve due to the sheer amount involved. That said, anyone who decides to dismiss The Christophers as just another Soderbergh film does so at their peril because, based on the evidence of both this film and its immediate predecessor, last year’s superlative Black Bag, he appears to be on another hot streak that will hopefully continue on into the future
.The notion of a pop star attempting to transfer their talents from the recording studio/concert stage to the big screen is nothing new, of course, but I cannot immediately recall any who gone quite as all-out in that pursuit than British singer Charli XCX. In the last few months, she has taken on a supporting role in 100 Nights of Hero, was front and center of the mockumentary The Moment and pops up in a bizarre cameo in Faces of Death and before long, she will also turn up in Gregg Araki’s wild I Want Your Sex and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist. (I am not even counting her musical contributions to the otherwise misbegotten Wuthering Heights and Mother Mary.) In her latest stab at screen stardom, Pete Ohs’s Erupcja, she stars as Bethany, a British party girl on a vacation in Warsaw with her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden), where they are forced to spend a few extra days when the eruption of Mt Etna shuts down air travel. As it happens, Warsaw is also the home of Nel (Lena Gora), a florist who has been friends (and possibly more) with Bethany ever since they met as teens when the 2010 eruptions in Iceland stranded her in Poland while on a trip (all of their subsequent reunions have been preceded by major volcanic activity) and when Bethany discovers that Rob is about to propose, she takes advantage of their coincidental attendance at the same house party to slip away with her for a few days of partying, getting high and dodging phone calls from Rob, who is frantically trying to track her down.
As slight as this might sound in theory, it proves to be even less so in practice. Despite clocking in at a not-particularly-substantial 71 minutes, Erupcja feels more like a vignette concocted as part of some kind of themed anthology film that has been stretched and padded out in order to make it to something close to a proper feature length. That said, this is not the kind of film that is going to leave most viewers clamoring for more as very little of it comes across as convincing, particularly when it comes to the allegedly combustible power of the friendship between Bethany and Nel, which comes across here for viewers with all the charged electricity of watching home movies of other people out having fun. Instead of providing scenes in which are able to actually hear these two reconnecting, we only get brief visual shards accompanied by an omniscient narrator talking about what they like to talk about, though the scenes in which we actually hear them converse are not exactly enlightening or interesting either because, despite the efforts of the two leads, we never quite buy them as friends or as anything else. Erupcja has a couple of modest pleasures—the performance from Gora is pretty strong, the visual style serves as a love letter to Warsaw and Charli XCX once again demonstrates that she does have a presence that works in cinematic terms, even if the film doesn’t quite know what to do with it. For the most part, however, it is a film that must have seemed like fun during its conception phase but that spirit of adventure does not transfer to the finished product—it is a curiosity that just doesn’t seem to be particularly curious about anything in particular.