From the very first scene of The Moment, Charli XCX is battling the inevitability of being cringe. It’s simply previous the height of 2024’s “Brat Summer season,” and Charli’s being guided via a script for a TikTok she’s speculated to movie by her social assistant Lloyd (Isaac Powell). She will’t be bothered, and neither can Lloyd — however alas, a model deal is a model deal, and the product shouldn’t care if its vendor is “being cringe” or not.
Charli’s new movie, helmed by music video director Aidan Zamiri, is all about these moments of compromise on the planet of a pop star experiencing a breakthrough. It’s in regards to the stress between the glory of success and the immense stress she feels to duplicate it, the human component of being an artist willingly exchanged for industrial achieve and securing a wider demographic of shoppers. It is usually an try at a music documentary below the guise of a mockumentary; although the movie, humorous however typically irritating, doesn’t work too laborious at deciding which one it’s.
The Second follows Charli as she makes an attempt to maintain the momentum of Brat going on the behest of her file label, initially trusting artistic director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) to provide her forthcoming headlining tour. However Amazon Music is paying for a live performance movie and documentary in regards to the tour, and her label has employed the very pretentious, seemingly tasteless director Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård) to supervise it.
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Celeste and Johannes conflict over their visions, with the latter’s efforts fully compromising your complete ethos of Brat for the sake of constructing the tour a typical pop spectacle and a industrial hit. In the meantime, the stress of getting to take care of success, be each model and artist, and chart her personal genuine path eats away at Charli and causes her to interrupt down.
Although it’s billed as a mockumentary, the framing of The Second suggests it’s a response to being truly requested by her workforce to make a live performance movie and corresponding documentary about what she was experiencing. The Second invents some central occasions of Charli XCX’s headlining tour in help of Brat, nevertheless it additionally makes it clear that that is the Charli XCX we’re seeing, not a separate, fictionalized character from the one we all know. Her prior excursions and albums are referenced; the songs of Brat seem and are used to contextualize the absurdity of her scenario. The occasions of the movie change into dramatic alternate actuality selections, however it’s about Charlotte Aitchison, the younger lady from Essex-turned-pop auteur.
So, Charli is utilizing The Second as a form of meta-move in subverting the thought of live performance movies and Behind the Music-fashion documentaries. It’s in no way rendered with the identical hilarity as, say, Popstar: By no means Cease By no means Stopping or This Is Spinal Tap, as a substitute taking itself extra critically and making an attempt to depict the genuine disorienting stress that Charli felt on the time. The tone of The Second, then, is a bit confused; it has some robust concepts about the price of being a real artist in pop music below capitalism, however the alternate actuality plotline and difficult narrative selections make The Second a lot much less subversive than it needs to be.
The Second (A24)
