It doesn’t take a Werner Herzog documentary (though one or two of those definitely help) to instantly understand the innate symbolic appeal of a massive volcano. Natural wonders spread across the world, and humblingly majestic even in their dormancy, these towering monuments of lava exist almost as a representation of a higher being’s ever-volatile fury, where a single eruption is enough to unleash the most memorable expulsion of red-hot passion. That eruption is ephemeral and unforgettable, and the undeniable awe of its spewing magma leaves nothing but destitution for any unfortunate enough to be caught in the path of its pyroclastic flow.
“Erupcja” articulates this wondrous and unstable appeal in its own way through the dialogue between its pocket-sized cast of characters, but regardless of the refusal to let metaphors lie undisturbed, Pete Ohs’s Charli XCX vehicle finds in that desire to poke the bear (…er, mountain?) his personal twist on the transience that makes an intermittent but furiously intense and mutually ruinous romance burst forth in a blaze of blinding ash.
For Bethany (Charli), that fleeting chance to dance in the embers comes when she and her boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) make their way to Warsaw for a brief getaway. Unbeknownst to Bethany, Rob has meticulously planned this trip around his intention to propose to her, but unbeknownst to Rob, this impending proposal is, in fact, not unbeknownst to Bethany at all. Fearing the impending question and unsure as to how she’ll even answer it, Bethany heads off, driven on by an impulsive urge to stoke an old flame.
Nel (Lena Góra) is a local flower shop owner who has, across Bethany’s four previous excursions to the Polish capital, carried on an uninhibited fling whenever the two are within running distance of each other and a raving club. Upon each of their encounters, a volcano somewhere in the world has erupted, which they’ve taken as a sign from nature itself of their union’s undeniable vigour, a vigour that simply must be nurtured and embraced every time the lava begins to bubble across the edge of the surface crust.
Where Rob and his intentions then fit into Bethany’s plans becomes the crux of “Erupcja” and its wispy exploration of the ecstasy of evanescence, as Ohs frames his whirlwind romance—one which is, surprisingly, entirely implied insofar as physical intimacy goes—in the increasingly popular mould of self-discovery at the expense of those who love you most, all in the quest to discover whether you actually love them enough to reciprocate that sort of commitment when the allure of earth-shaking eros lies just one text alert away.
As Bethany becomes something of a ghost to the man she may or may not want to marry, “Erupcja” frames itself as a spectral, drug-addled observer to her attempts to relive the dream she had on the plane ride over to Poland—that of riding a train that never stops ramping up its speed, and never crashes.
Squeezing this excursion into the condensed framing of his academy ratio as all of Warsaw is distilled into only the tight quarters that feed into Bethany and Nel’s mutual thirst, Ohs, acting as his own cinematographer, shoots the film with a sort of blinking detachment and a fondness of screen-consuming lights that, aesthetically, only puts the film a few degrees away from the “brat” version of a Gaspar Noé production.
Of course, in its sort of aesthetic reminiscence of Noé’s own excursions into the European underworld, Ohs finds himself a few traumatic undertakings shy of reaching that same skin-crawling impact, which serves to demonstrate just how opposing his aims actually are. Flickering in at just 71 minutes and plotted through the impromptu, real-life expeditions of the actors themselves, “Erupcja” undeniably practices what it preaches in the real-time search for meaning in Bethany’s relationships with and impacts on those surrounding her. How much that slightness actually manages to ingrain that impact, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.
That is, in its own way, the expressed aim of a film whose full inhabiting of its wistful presentation creates an undeniable mirror between a popstar facing a very public artistic crossroads—as this year’s Charli-centred mockumentary “The Moment” posits it, To Brat or Not to Brat—and the romantically inert wanderer she plays here. Ms. XCX, for her own part, is believable if purposely vacant as a screen presence in selling that depicted inertia, and after spending so much time on the ground with his lead, Ohs recognizes enough of her increasingly mythologizable aura to harness it for his own purposes.
The resulting addition to that progressing canon of celebrity mythos harbours a far greater desire to capture the impermanence implied in its titular natural phenomenon than linger on the lasting impact of its aftermath, but if “Erupcja” is very clear in its conclusions about just how prevalent violent volcanic flows actually are across the year, Ohs remains just as clear in his understanding that their deceptive commonality removes none of the awe borne from each and every flurry of their red-hot flames.
