"Released January 30th, A24’s The Moment is a mockumentary tour film directed by Aidan Zamiri and co-written with Bertie Brandes, with original ideas from Charli XCX."-- CeCe Burgery, 8th grade
Released January 30th, A24’s The Moment is a mockumentary tour film directed by Aidan Zamiri and co-written with Bertie Brandes, with original ideas from Charli XCX. In the movie, “[XCX] plays a more pitched, volatile and transparently insecure version of herself in preparation for the Brat tour,” writes The Guardian
XCX doesn’t need an introduction. With three Grammys, six studio albums and ruling Billboard’s Hot 100 for 31 consecutive weeks, she’s become a household name.
A lot of that success can be attributed to her most recent studio album brat.
The album, brat, rocked the world and put XCX back into the pop spotlight. People were crazed by its experimental electronic beats and vulnerable, reflective lyrics. Its success crushed the entire nation, reaching #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 the week of its release.
The term brat summer spread like wildfire, eventually turning into brat fall and even brat winter. (I’ve written 2 pieces on it, but I mean who’s counting?) Everything was brat. And as weeks turned to months, fans and community alike were left with one question: Will brat ever end? More importantly, do we want it to?
Turns out XCX was battling with the same thing. “It’s really hard to let go of brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life, you know? I started thinking about culture, and the ebbs and flows and lifespan of things,” the star stated in a Tiktok video.
Set in September of 2024 (commonly known as the peak of brat), XCX (playing a fictionalized version of herself) prepares for her world tour. Her character is authentic, almost carefree.
In a meeting with her team she goes as far as calling it “cringe.” It’s obvious she doesn’t care about the deals or the money she could be making off it. She cares about her image, her fans, her music.
But Charli is thrown into the inevitable media cycle by her record label. One of many being a tour film directed by the pretentious Johannes Godwin. It’s made clear from the start that Godwin doesn’t understand Charli’s audience or brat, for that matter. He insists on sitting in during rehearsals and abusing the growing power he has over brat to change its entire meaning.
Godwin puts endless pressure on Charli and her creative team, we see Charli’s character slowly change under his ideas. The fear of irrelevance is planted in her head. Like the rest of the world, she begins to fear the end of brat and once again being “insignificant” to the industry.
XCX doesn’t need an introduction. With three Grammys, six studio albums and ruling Billboard’s Hot 100 for 31 consecutive weeks, she’s become a household name.
A lot of that success can be attributed to her most recent studio album brat.
The album, brat, rocked the world and put XCX back into the pop spotlight. People were crazed by its experimental electronic beats and vulnerable, reflective lyrics. Its success crushed the entire nation, reaching #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 the week of its release.
The term brat summer spread like wildfire, eventually turning into brat fall and even brat winter. (I’ve written 2 pieces on it, but I mean who’s counting?) Everything was brat. And as weeks turned to months, fans and community alike were left with one question: Will brat ever end? More importantly, do we want it to?
Turns out XCX was battling with the same thing. “It’s really hard to let go of brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life, you know? I started thinking about culture, and the ebbs and flows and lifespan of things,” the star stated in a Tiktok video.
Set in September of 2024 (commonly known as the peak of brat), XCX (playing a fictionalized version of herself) prepares for her world tour. Her character is authentic, almost carefree.
In a meeting with her team she goes as far as calling it “cringe.” It’s obvious she doesn’t care about the deals or the money she could be making off it. She cares about her image, her fans, her music.
But Charli is thrown into the inevitable media cycle by her record label. One of many being a tour film directed by the pretentious Johannes Godwin. It’s made clear from the start that Godwin doesn’t understand Charli’s audience or brat, for that matter. He insists on sitting in during rehearsals and abusing the growing power he has over brat to change its entire meaning.
Godwin puts endless pressure on Charli and her creative team, we see Charli’s character slowly change under his ideas. The fear of irrelevance is planted in her head. Like the rest of the world, she begins to fear the end of brat and once again being “insignificant” to the industry.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, XCX states about The Moment, “I could’ve made some of these [bad] decisions, because when you are opened up to a wider audience, it really can kinda spin you out.”
The movie is incredibly vulnerable and uses the common experience of not feeling like enough, to draw the viewer in even closer. It’s incredibly paced and effortlessly funny.
Fans of the artist posted themselves leaving the theatre in tears. Others commented about how much closer they felt to XCX and her work.
So why did nobody like it?
Critics will be critics no doubt, but I couldn’t find a full article that praised the film! Blogs and newspaper reviews sounded a lot more like this Reddit user’s post, calling the film “an unmitigated mess.”
“There’s a smart idea at play here, with the star playing a hellish version of herself fighting against corporate forces, but there’s not a lot else” comments long time personal enemy,” The Guardian.
People thought it was stupid and utterly disappointing. Like, “Oh great, another cash grab tour film, that her relentless fans were gonna use as an excuse to drag brat busted and wig-less for another year.”
And yeah, that was kinda the point. The Moments' last defender, @SquareVaccum, writes under that same Reddit post, “Critics will never understand camp.” And to that I agree.
The Moment was never about brat. It was about the album cycle, “the moment,” when enough was enough, when to drown out the opinions and when to take criticism.
There is a certain audience that will never get XCX or her work and if it's not mainstream party girl pop it’s probably not gonna hit the Billboard again. They skipped over every song on brat that wasn’t about partying or or falling in love and lost out on loads of talent.
Missing what the album meant for her, it was XCX showing us she could be this “365 Partygirl” and still do a double take in the mirror every morning. None of the sympathy it emitted felt forced, just felt plain relatable.
So, critic voices or not, she achieved what she set out to achieve. A relic tour film that immortalized brat at its core and threw what was left to the wolves,
XCX says in an interview with Vanity Fair, “I don’t really get to decide when it’s over or not, I think that’s up to the world.”
So, see ya’ll next summer?
