Only a species suffering from terminal main character syndrome would, when describing intimately human experiences like love, reach for the language of global cataclysm. Tsunami, earthquake, meteor strike, volcano: We’re barely in love at all unless our metaphor is a natural catastrophe with the potential for mass devastation. Pete Ohs‘ “Erupcja” (Polish for eruption) is peppered with pyroclastic clouds and mountaintops belching glowing rivulets of lava. But in both slight story and lo-fi form, it’s a denial of the grandiose notion that the massive forces of geological transformation might exist merely to reflect the wonky workings of the human heart. Volcanoes, like stars and tides and changing seasons, don’t give a damn.
It’s a bittersweet point he’s making, but the splashier irony of Ohs’ film is that Bethany, the Londoner adrift in Poland who must learn the hard lesson that it’s not all about her, is played by Charli XCX — one of the few people on the planet whom, less than two years after her generation-defining “Brat” album, it could legitimately all be about. And there are a bunch of tried-and-tested, PR-strategized ways to parlay pop stardom into movie stardom.
But none of them involves Charli reverse-alchemizing her global phenom status into producer, actor and co-writer credits on a micro-budgeted, willfully niche project like “Erupcja.” It suggests a cinephile’s seriousness about the shape and longevity of her movie career that would be promising even if she wasn’t good in the film. Except she is: She plays Bethany as a charismatic but callously self-absorbed young woman who, unlike Charli, doesn’t actually have much going on to be so absorbed by. To put it another way: Bethany’s a brat without actually being brat.
One of Ohs’ witty edits (the director is also the cutter, cinematographer, producer and co-writer, alongside the cast) reveals that the tectonic rumbling on the soundtrack is not magma boiling beneath the earth’s crust, just the banal clatter of a cabin-sized suitcase being wheeled along a pavement. Bethany is trundling through Warsaw with her boyfriend Rob (Will Madden), looking for their Airbnb. Back in London, they’ve been living together for a year — like much background detail, this is related to us in laconic Polish by a drily omniscient narrator (Jan Lubaczewski), who gives this ’90s-style indie a little French New Wave vibe.
But it’s clear from their body language and vocal inflections (his: enthusiastic, devoted, a bit clingy; hers: detached, rote, a little bored) that they may not be on the same page of their particular book of love. While Rob, who is plotting a marriage proposal, has a snooze, Bethany goes out to “explore.” Actually, she walks purposefully to a flower shop owned by Nel (Lena Góra), whom she met 16 years prior on a school trip, and several times since.
On each occasion, the fireworks of at least a passionate friendship occurred through blurry nights of partying. (It’s unclear, and not hugely important, whether Bethany and Nel’s relationship is, or ever was, sexual.) And on each occasion, somewhere in the world, a volcano erupted — perhaps all the ejaculatory imagery renders an actual sex scene moot. This is a cosmic coincidence that Nel and Bethany joke about, but which tacitly reinforces the specialness of their bond. Right on cue, there blows Mt. Etna.
Bethany’s flight home is canceled, so she and Rob have a few more days to spend in Warsaw together, but increasingly separately. After a house party thrown by Claude (Jeremy O. Harris), a friendly expat American whom they meet by chance because no one has ever been on a Euro city break and not encountered a friendly expat American, Bethany leaves with Nel and stops answering Rob’s calls. Nel ignores the concern of her sister (Maja Michnacka) and breaks a date with her ex (Agata Trzebuchowska) to hang with Bethany instead.
That’s really all that happens; the height of the action is Bethany sitting and drunkenly reciting Byron’s “Darkness” — a poem chosen, one assumes, for its bombastic, vulcanized imagery but also for its author’s reputation as an incorrigible narcissist. Because while “Erupcja” is too modest to sell its revelations as earth-shattering, it does neatly upend our preconceptions about these vividly flawed characters. Initially we’re cued to despise poor, cuckolded Rob, for demonstrating the commonplace male affliction of a total failure of imagination when it comes to his girlfriend’s interior life. And we’re cued to sympathize with Bethany’s restless desire for something other than a dully domesticated future with a guy who pees sitting down and muses “I should drink more water tomorrow” after glancing into the toilet.
But in incremental, imperceptible shifts, we’ve done a full 180 by the film’s generous ending, which is kind to everyone who deserves it and tough on those who don’t, while wisely nudging the rest of us away from the folly of pursuing some previous, nostalgized version of ourselves. That person belongs to a different time, to a different town and to people who cannot be expected to be the same, any more than the slopes of a volcano can be expected to still be molten rock an eon after the last eruption.
English (US) ·