Parties at the Venice Film Festival are reached by speedboat, with guest lists curated by major fashion labels. Cannes soirees unfold on the glittering Côte d’Azur, where stars in couture drink champagne and cavort by the sea.
But Sundance parties are historically the least chic of the major film festivals. How can they be, when everyone is wearing puffer jackets?
It takes a special kind of rager to heat up a festival held in frigid Park City, Utah, but leave it to Charli XCX to provide. Two weeks ago, the pop star landed there to premiere her new A24 film, “The Moment,” and anticipation for the after-party was so high that some festivalgoers were pushed to their last resort: texting me for tickets.
“Not to be shameless, but I heard you’re writing about Charli,” one acquaintance said. “Can you get me in?”
“I never ask you for anything,” said a publicist whose job is asking me for things. “But do you have a plus-one?”
They assumed that if the party was half as good as the ones Charli sings about, it would be the hottest ticket at Sundance. Her persona proved such a powerful lure that it even reached the demographic least familiar with Charli’s charms: straight men.
When one such person hit me up for an invite, I asked him, “What do you know about Charli XCX?”
Shrugging, he mumbled, “The Kamala tweet …?”
If, like him, you need a quick primer on all things Charli, here goes: The British pop star’s brash but vulnerable 2024 album, “Brat,” was a Grammy-nominated sensation, propelled by a creative vision as cohesive as any major brand’s. The album cover’s sickly shade of green was inescapable that summer, as was the “brat” signifier, applied to anything deemed cool, audacious or unafraid to mess with convention.
But by the time Charli declared on X that Kamala Harris, then running for president, was brat — leading to no end of befuddled mainstream coverage — the concept had grown much more complicated. Could something remain brat even as it moved toward the mainstream? And was it brat for Charli to perform at the Grammys after once joking in a song that she’d rather burn the place down?
That tension informed not just “The Moment,” which I’ll get to, but also the after-party, which I got to just before midnight. Held in a club on Park City’s main street, it was packed with big stars, It girls, and pervasive branding from party sponsors like Facetune, the app for aggressively airbrushing your selfies.
Was that kind of artifice so ironic that it became cool again? Had we reached an ouroboros of brat? I left those questions for future-me to ponder while heading to the perilously crowded V.I.P. area.
As servers circulated with plates of tacos — which Utah, of course, is renowned for — I met a longhaired yogurt magnate who turned out to be Alexander Skarsgard’s best friend, talked “Heated Rivalry” with the “Chicken Shop Date” host Amelia Dimoldenberg, and squeezed past the director-actor Taika Waititi, whose affinity for partying is as finely tuned as a Michelin critic’s palate.
By the time I reached Charli, wearing a tight white corset and a fur coat she looked ready to shrug off, she was sequestered in a banquette with her co-stars Rachel Sennott and Kate Berlant. The area around her was so packed that well-wishers like Rosanna Arquette could barely inch over to coo, “You look amazing!” And yet, after a brief huddle with Aidan Zamiri, who directed “The Moment,” I turned to realize that Charli had somehow escaped confinement and disappeared.
A thorough sweep of the party revealed no pop star, even as A24 publicists texted frantically, trying to find her. With hordes outside still so desperate to enter that the police were doing crowd control on horseback, had Charli skipped out on her own party?
The idea was very … well, you know.
THE NEXT MORNING, I met up with Charli in a nearby cottage to pop some pills.
“Oh my God, let’s go crazy,” she said as we each downed a hangover-battling Advil.
Recapping the previous night, she explained that she had migrated from the V.I.P. area to the dance floor once the D.J., the “Brat” producer A.G. Cook, began playing the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” After that, a smoke break in the snow was mandatory, then she met John Barlow, a “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star, which was practically the highlight of the whole trip.
But she had made it back into the party just before it was shut down at 2 a.m. And then, of course, there was an after-after-party at her place.
If that all sounds true to form, she gets it. “People think I’m, like, 365 party girl! Smoking cigs! White strappy top!” she said. “I understand why, and I don’t hate it — it’s quite fun.”
Still, a star’s authentic personality can become a caricature if too many people start paying attention.
“And then you’re like, ‘Whoa, I created that persona for myself and now I can’t escape it,’” Charli said.
That’s the conundrum at the heart of “The Moment,” a satirical spin on the very real period after “Brat,” her sixth studio album, thrust Charli from the outskirts of pop culture into its very center. Playing a slightly exaggerated version of herself, Charli tries to mount an arena tour with the same iconoclastic ethos as her album, only to clash with a music-documentary filmmaker (Skarsgard) hired to make her cocaine-and-cigarettes persona more palatable for general audiences.
As it turns out, watching an artist repeatedly forced into creative compromise is every bit as stressful as a Safdie brothers movie. “I’ve definitely felt some of the feelings that we see me experience in this film,” Charli said. “I’ve felt under pressure, I’ve had breakdowns in the back of cars whilst ripping out my hair extensions.”
And in a world ruled by social media, those feelings are no longer limited to pop stars, she asserted.
“There is just so much pressure on everybody all the time to perform — to perform online, to perform a version of yourself to your friends,” she said.
For most of her career, Charli saw herself as “famous but not quite,” which gave her a certain perspective on the art of crafting a public persona. Now 33, she’s her own favorite test subject: On Substack, where she writes essays about her sometimes-empowering, often-embarrassing pursuit of stardom, Charli can sound like a pop-tometrist testing different lenses and murmuring, “Better? Or worse?”
The tension between cool and commercial has always fascinated her, which is why she found the prolonging of the “Brat” era worth a feature-length examination. The desire to make something last forever is tempting in Hollywood, where artists often keep doubling down on their biggest successes. But Charli, who had never experienced a breakthrough on this scale, was always used to moving on to the next album or idea.
So even as she and Zamiri mapped out more music videos and made “The Moment,” they were acutely aware that their brand of cool might come with an expiration date. Whether Kamala was ever truly brat, we’re now more than a year into the other guy’s administration and A24 is still advertising Charli’s new movie in that familiar shade of puke green. When Brat summer is stretched long past the season in which it was coined, does chic begin to curdle into cringe?
“I remember thinking, God, is that pushing it a little bit?” Zamiri admitted. “It does feel, thematically, there is this tension with ‘Brat’ overstaying its welcome.”
But Charli and Zamiri decided to steer into that tension, weaving it into what they consider the film’s thesis statement: When faux-Charli encounters Kylie Jenner during a spa retreat and confesses to fears of overexposure, the reality star seems stunned by her admission.
“The second you think people are getting sick of you, that’s when you have to go even harder,” Jenner says.
WHEN IT COMES to promoting “The Moment,” Charli seems to have taken Jenner’s advice to heart. She’s been everywhere lately, presenting at last week’s Grammys and popping up on podcasts like “SmartLess,” where the host Jason Bateman was utterly befuddled to learn she has no plans to put her career on hold to have children.
And though she considers “The Moment” to be the natural end of the “Brat” era, you’ll be seeing plenty more of Charli in the next few months. She appeared in two other Sundance films, “The Gallerist” and “I Want Your Sex,” stars in the forthcoming indie “Erupcja,” and supplies the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s lavish reimagining of “Wuthering Heights,” due on Feb. 13.
“I really do work myself into a stupor sometimes,” she said. “If I wasn’t making things, I don’t know what would happen to me.”
A new album will come eventually, but for now she’s more energized by moviemaking and determined to follow through on her current momentum. Part of that drive is the desire to strike while the iron is hot, though she has always been a workaholic, regardless of the medium.
“I’m running away from the silence and the stopping,” she said, referencing one of her songs: “I literally say it in ‘365’: Don’t sleep, don’t eat, just do it on repeat. That is my ethos. I don’t know if I’ve even quite figured out what I’m running from, but it’s something, and creating helps me do that.”
So does blowing off steam. At the Sundance bash, I spoke to the “Moment” producer David Hinojosa, who detailed how frequently Charli threw weekend parties during the shoot to help the cast and crew bond. “I’ve never made a movie that way,” he said, “and I’m going to steal that.”
With only 26 days to shoot the film, Charli said all that partying was essential. There was a mid-movie karaoke night “that really turned chaotic,” she recalled, with Zamiri hanging from the ceiling and accidentally taking down an LED panel. There were nights spent barhopping across seemingly every corner of East London. And then there was the wrap party, which was so meticulously planned — from the custom lighting to the cocktails to the D.J.s — that it became a full-blown project in its own right.
“We wanted to create a truly intimate bonding feeling throughout shooting and we didn’t have that much time together,” Charli said. “So Aidan and I made a promise to ourselves that we would go out every single weekend. We were like, ‘We’ve got to party, because everybody has to be so connected.’”
And there was another reason, of course.
“We have a reputation to uphold,” Zamiri said.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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