Charli XCX's spit in the music industry

Special correspondent in BerlinThey're not always well executed, but there are many interesting ideas in them. The momentThe film presented this Saturday at the Berlinale features singer Charli XCX playing a fictionalized version of herself. This decision creates a curious tension and ambiguity, because the film draws on the singer's recent biography, but manipulates and alters it through the mechanisms of fiction. "I've spent my whole life preparing for this role, I'm very much a method actor," Charli XCX joked at the Berlinale, explaining that the film stems from the "extreme leap" she experienced when her last album, Brato, It became the album of the summer of 2024. "I went from being an artist who moved on the fringes with an almost exclusively gay audience to suddenly having a massive audience. I felt like I was losing control of something I had always been able to control, and that made me think about how we communicate art and how we communicate art and.

It's hard to imagine a more self-aware proposal than The moment, in which there is constant dialogue with everything that has surrounded Charli XCX since 2024. In fact, the singer herself has acknowledged that she wanted the film to "interact" with the real world, and to coincide with the end of the campaign of Brato with the premiere of the film, in which the fictional Charli ends up deciding that she wants to "kill" Brato"and get rid of them. "I've always been interested in the permanence of art in the cultural space, the tension of being there for too long or too short a time," the singer commented. "Especially in pop music, because fans are always asking for their new album or their new version. And, in this sense, making the film has been cathartic because it has allowed me to channel my real frustrations."

Directed in an almost documentary style by Aidan Zamiri, The moment It portrays an independent artist riding for the first time the wave that has turned her into a pop phenomenon mainstream Coveted by all brands and someone the record company wants to keep milking. Sean Price Williams' camera, the Safdie brothers' regular cinematographer, follows him through advertising shoots, nights out, and tour rehearsals. Brato A Charli XCX progressively overwhelmed by the scale of everything around her and suffocated by the constant presence of the director in charge of filming the tour documentary, an Alexander Skarsgård who is funny, but so over the top that he sometimes seems to be in a different movie.

More than a film about the phenomenon of Brato, The moment It aims to be a veiled jab at a music industry that aspires to reduce the artist to the status of a committee-designed product accessible to all audiences. True to its title, it's also a film of moments, such as opening credits reminiscent of Chris Cunningham's music videos, the awkward encounter with actress Rachel Sinnott at a party, or the getaway to Ibiza—featuring a brilliant cameo by Kylie Jenner—a sequence in which the film flirts like the movie Flirte. Furthermore, it offers an explicit critique of the saccharine sweetness of pop music. mainstream In the Taylor Swift era, who isn't directly mentioned but looms over the story as a paradigm of the new pop star that Skarsgård wants to transform the film's protagonist into.

A remake filmed in Catalonia

This Saturday also saw the premiere at the Berlinale of the closest thing to a Catalan representative in this year's official competition: Rosebush pruning It is the film by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz filmed in Catalonia in 2024 With an international cast of stars including Pamela Anderson, Elle Fanning, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Callum Turner, the most likely candidate to become the new James Bond. But the occasional urban landscapes of Barcelona, ​​filmed by the prestigious cinematographer Hélène Louvart, are by far the brightest element of this dark and sordid tale about a bourgeois family living on the outskirts of the city in a kind of parallel reality, practically isolated from the world and obsessed with one another.

The film is remake very free fromdebut work by the Italian master Marco Bellocchio The cuffs in the pockets (Y pugne in tasca(from 1965), adapted by Yorgos Lanthimos's trusted screenwriter, the Greek Evthimis Filipu. And it is precisely the cinema of Lanthimos at his most cruel and aesthetically driven that is the first reference that comes to mind when watching Rosebush pruningThe film, which uses its star-studded cast to orchestrate this tale of emptiness, aims to win over the audience with its pitch-black humor, but only succeeds in the dinner scene where one of the sons introduces his girlfriend to the family and the blind father asks for a physical description of her. The desire to provoke and unsettle viewers is undeniable, but it's difficult to identify any other objectives or outcomes of the film.