Erupcja

Charli xcx is having a moment on the big screen. Pivoting from Brat summer, the multi-hyphenate has written music for Mother Mary and Wuthering Heights, produced and starred in a mockumentary about her own career, and signed up for further quirky cinematic projects. 

With a lick of the French New Wave, a nip of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and a dash of the playful end of the Polish Film School, Erupcja is the latest. Writer, director, editor and cinematographer Pete Ohs’ shot-on-the-hop, playfully wistful deconstruction of the romcom, co-written with his cast, presents Charli as restless soul, Bethany.

A return visitor to Poland’s capital city, Warsaw, this time she’s brought her live-in boyfriend, Rob, played by fellow musician-turned-actor Will Madden. Her glazed looks, as they endure the frustrating mundanity of self-checking-in to an Airbnb, suggest she’s already checked out of their relationship.

Erupcja (the Polish word for eruption) opens with footage of Mount Etna going up, with Rob and Bethany’s planned flight home cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud. This real-life event doesn’t foreshadow a big blow-up between them. Leaning into the great cinematic tradition of foreigners finding (and losing) themselves abroad, their slow death is a mostly amicable fizzer.

When Rob snoozes on arrival, Bethany scoots to the apartment of Nel (Lena Góra), a Berlin techno-loving florist she first met here 16 years ago when they were teenagers. Strangely, Bethany silently observes Nel from a distance.

An engaging misadventure with a wanderlust spirit

Theirs is a complex bond, a platonic-plus that’s more mercurial than that of a lover. With a habit of falling in with one another to the exclusion of all others, including Nel’s recently resurfaced ex, Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska), Bethany and Nel are soon back on their bullshit, sending a ring-bearing Rob straight to voicemail after they ditch him at a house party of an American artist (Jeremy O Harris).

Clubbing all night, Bethany and Nel eventually wobble their way home for a poetry recital, treating us to lines of Lord Byron’s Darkness: ‘And men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation.’

It’s no shade on Erupcja to note that this Byronesque flourish is more dramatic than anything else playing out here. At a slight 71 minutes, it nevertheless manages to be an engaging misadventure with a wanderlust spirit, replete with a jolly voiceover narration from Jacek Zubiel, constantly reminding us life is one big joke.

Just like that explosive footage at the start, which sounds like it’s accompanied by a volcanic rumble, but it’s actually the trundling of Bethany’s suitcase rolling on paving stones. It turns out that Charli xcx was made for this kind of slacker comedy served with a side of ennui, and she shares undeniable chemistry with Góra. Together, their mischief leads not to a bang, but definitely something bigger than a whimper. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jun 5.