Charli XCX, having transformed the cultural mood in her slime-green, that-bitch persona, and revealing she’ll be inaugurating London Fashion Week with an H&M-backed rave, is now taking her Parliaments and heading to Hollywood. She will be part of the ensemble in Gregg Araki’s addition to the growing May-December repertoire, I Want Your Sex.
Scripted by Vogue columnist Karley Sciortino and named after George Michael’s 1987 chart-topping hit, the narrative revolves around Olivia Wilde’s character, Erika Tracy, an imagined artist possessing the cultural weight of Marina Abramović. She begins a relationship with her significantly younger employee, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). (If you ponder why Cooper’s name seems familiar, he portrayed Gary Valentine alongside Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza—and, indeed, he is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s offspring.) Initially, Elliot is ecstatic to be Erika’s “gentle lover with a heart of gold,” but their liaison soon drifts into Adrian Lyne territory as “Erika leads him on a journey more profound than he could ever envision, delving into a realm of sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder.” Baby, you’ve been so unkind, indeed. There’s still no word regarding Charli’s character role, but I hope she gets to don a bodysuit as chic as Kathy Jeung’s in George’s softcore ’80s music video.
But it’s Faces of Death that will serve as Charli’s official film debut with co-stars Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, and Josie Totah. Directed by How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s Daniel Goldhaber, the work is inspired by the highly contentious 1978 shockumentary sharing the same name, which begins with an alleged pathologist, Dr. Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr), presenting a sequence of clips showcasing gruesome fatalities—some fabricated, some genuine. “For the first time in movie history, the utmost fear of all humanity will be vividly exposed,” declared the trailer. “Now, a cinematic piece dares to take you beyond the boundary of the living.” Naturally, it became a viral sensation, with millions of VHS copies distributed nationwide, cementing its status as the landmark film of the decade’s “video nasty” trend. Thankfully, Goldhaber has no intention of recreating the mondo movie (whose horridly graphic visuals resulted in it being banned in numerous countries, including the UK). Instead, he adopts a meta perspective, with his story trailing a content moderator for a YouTube-like platform who unearths a group recreating scenes from the ’70s classic for their audience.
Curiously, Charli personally contacted Goldhaber about a part in the film, and he isn’t the sole writer-director she has approached for a partnership in recent months. Just earlier this (Brat) summer, she ventured to Poland to film another project she is reportedly co-writing with Slave Play‘s Jeremy O Harris. Luckily, she’s already equipped with enough movie-star sunglasses to navigate at least a dozen paparazzi-laden press junkets.
