The Moment

As the angels enter the MFF era, I thought I'd finally finally finally watch the fucking Moment. It was a moment. Charli embodies a punk ethos rarely seen in mainstream media by obliterating the music industry, her peers, the film industry and, most importantly, herself. Anyone who isn't in the immediate line of fire will surely catch some shrapnel. What's so fun and interesting is how metatextual this is: Charli is striding the line between her reality and this narrativised fictional reality, and they both exist simultaneously in the real world as the real Charli navigates her real experiences with Brat. The way she reaches out into the ether and grabs hold of things as they happen, then transforms them into plotpoints and commentaries is so great. There's a strong sense of unreality to everything, and it's taken to its natural conclusion as she works out, in real time, how she feels about the death of art. Charli herself shines in this, and whilst her acting is persistently visible, when she gets into her stride, she has so much fun skewering her public persona and playing up to a different shade of herself. Temporary-angels who got on the bus with Brat are surely to be confused by this - the album is oft-misinterpreted as a cokey dance album when the reality is it's a confessional diary entry with a glitchy masquerade of partying. This film doesn't masquerade. Some very real first-time-boogies for both Charli and Aidan stop this film from really reaching some higher heights - it too often relies on gags and jokes that we've seen before in media like this, even if they're still well-executed here (the Charli mannequin falling, for example) - and the overt thematic bookmarks make the subtext feel more like a dot-to-dot drawing than a well-blended commentary, but overall, The Moment is a fiercely ambitious deconstruction of an icon.