Charli XCX at Berlinale: Film & Intelligence

In 2024, she was everywhere. British pop singer Charli XCX managed to turn the then lime-green album Brat into a global pop culture event, which, thanks to social networks, grew into a phenomenon known in English as brat summer, translated as the summer of brats. It even penetrated the American presidential election, when the then candidate for the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, signed up for the visual aesthetic of the record.

Less than two years later, the thirty-three-year-old star is now definitively closing this chapter with the feature film The Moment. Last month it had its world premiere at the American Sundance festival, this weekend Charli XCX personally presented it at the German Berlinale.

“Of course, it will depend on the world, but as far as I’m concerned, brother summer is over,” the singer answered when asked by journalists whether she intends to continue developing this intersection of music and informal fashion. “As they say in the movie: You can’t decide how it ends when it’s over,” he adds.

At the American Sundance, the film divided critics. Before the premiere in Berlin on Saturday in the luxury cinema Zoo Palast, fans waited for many hours despite the cold to catch a glimpse of their favorite celebrity.

The film is a so-called mockumentary or pseudo-documentary in its genre, which depicts fictional events as real. Charli XCX plays a variation of herself: A pop star preparing for her first tour under the pressure of fame and the expectations of the music industry.

Much like the real Charli XCX had a reputation as more of an alternative artist for years, her movie version started with a devoted group of fans before suddenly skyrocketing to worldwide fame. And now she is taking different career steps than the ones advised by the publishing house.

“The scenarios we present in the film are not real,” the singer explained in Berlin. “But under different circumstances, they could easily be. I myself have come close to such circumstances over the years in the music industry,” she added.

In the film, Alexander Skarsgård plays a cocky director sent by the studio to film her concert. Kylie Jenner, known for the reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, model Julia Fox or actress and comedian Rachel Sennott will also appear in front of the camera. All of them, like the singer, play fictional versions of themselves.

Aidan Zamiri directed the film as his feature debut. The singer describes the filming as cathartic, she says it allowed her to process some things that frustrated her in reality as well.

“We were very interested in the question of the durability of a work of art, the tension that comes from occupying a cultural space longer than you were supposed to,” suggests the singer.

Britain’s Guardian film newspaper granted three out of five stars. According to the reviewer, it can capture ideas from a visual point of view, but at the same time it is strangely empty and requires viewers to have an advanced orientation in the brat summer phenomenon.

It doesn’t help either that, next to experienced actors like Skarsgård, Charli XCX’s performance resembles “a stuttering, nervous student mechanically repeating her lines and trying to break out of her well-established persona”, the paper assesses.

The film does the opposite he liked to the critic of the music website Pitchfork, who describes it as a mixture of a thriller full of celebrities, a reality show and a pop documentary. “I saw her twice on the Brat tour, and the concert scenes in the movie are just as great as she was live,” the author mentions.

But according to her, the film is primarily a satire on the music industry and how it is structured today by money revolving around videos. “The film is smarter than it looks and far more ambitious than most pop documentaries. I don’t see how we’ve gone this long without female pop satire,” concludes Pitchfork.

Charli XCX is focusing on film this year. Also, Czech cinemas are already showing the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, for which she composed the soundtrack. In addition to The Moment, the singer acts in three other films: The Gallerist, I Want Your Sex and Faces of Death.