One of the key works of the modern cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy,” from 1954—starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a British couple whose travels around Naples expose their suppressed conflicts—taught the era’s filmmakers that, with two actors and a car, they could endow an intimate story with emotional grandeur and documentary veracity. The filmmaker Pete Ohs does something startlingly similar with his new film, “Erupcja,” a low-budget romantic melodrama that shares many of the key qualities of Rossellini’s film, including its story, its approach to casting, and its freewheeling shoot.
“Erupcja,” which premièred today at the Toronto International Film Festival, could be called “Voyage to Poland.” It stars Charli XCX, in one of her first movie roles, as a Londoner named Bethany, who takes a trip to Warsaw with her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden). They’ve planned a romantic getaway—she loves Warsaw, and he’s never been—but it proves to be something different, because of a woman who lives there, named Nel (Lena Góra). When the couple get settled in their Airbnb rental (thirty-nine euros a night), Rob takes a nap and Bethany goes exploring—or, rather, stalking. She hides near a flower shop that Nel runs, follows Nel home, then phones her and is invited upstairs. It turns out that this is a reunion. Bethany and Nel became friends on Bethany’s previous trips to Warsaw (this is her fifth), and, as they’ve long realized, each time they’re together, a volcano erupts—hence the film’s Polish title. This time it’s Mount Etna: smoke from the eruption temporarily grounds planes in Europe. Bethany and Rob are stuck a few extra days in Warsaw, and Bethany would rather spend them with Nel.
Ohs tells an unusual story—of nonsexual friendship that nonetheless delivers as strong an emotional kick as sexual love. All the more unusually, the story is told not only through onscreen drama but literally: a voice-over by an unnamed omniscient narrator (played by Jacek Zubiel) sketches motives and memories, backstory and incidental details, and even forthcoming events. The spoken narrative, with its spare, literary diction and vigorous precision, seems to add details and even scenes to the image-scape. The copious observations and reflections that the speaker relates expand the movie—a mere seventy-one minutes long—into a work of novelistic amplitude.
As characters pop into the action, they get caught up in the volcanic ardor of the two women’s friendship and risk getting burned. There’s Nel’s ex, Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska), who has recently returned to the city without telling Nel; there’s Nel’s customer, Jan (Jan Lubaczewski), who buys flowers to sustain a fragile romance; and there’s an American artist, Claude (Jeremy O. Harris), whose open-door policy makes him a mender of broken hearts and a searcher for lost souls. Above all, there’s Rob, whose romantic getaway has turned into a slog of romantic anguish. Emotional turbulence courses through the film, conveyed less by spectacular blowups than with a finely tuned mechanism of phone calls and voice mails, visits and absences, plans made and forgotten and brazenly broken. The web of secrets and confessions, schemes and counterplots, short-term pleasures and far-reaching decisions, are couched in dialogue that is pugnacious, vulnerable, comedic, and sometimes richly poetic, and which feels as spontaneous as it is carefully crafted.
Ohs has described his method as collaborative and as calculatedly improvisational, a mix of composition in advance and real-time discovery. He wrote the script together with four members of the cast—Charli XCX, Góra, Harris, and Madden—and they did much of the writing during the shoot, which was made on location in D.I.Y. style—indeed, Ohs has said, “I’m basically the whole crew.” The resulting feeling of methodical spontaneity carries over into Ohs’s images. Doing his own camerawork and editing, he displays a keen psychological eye, with sequences that don’t merely depict action but also conjure states of mind and correlate the face of the city with the characters’ inner lives. Ohs films his cast with a sensibility that’s closer to documentary than to fiction. The actors flaunt no more glamour than the characters’ modest circumstances suggest, and they command the screen without any Method raging or the actorly one-upmanship that improv often brings. Ohs relies on their charismatic presence as a springboard for invention—and even self-invention. Charli XCX may not have much movie experience, but she dominates the action with classical canniness, her energetic yet poised performance showing keen awareness that movie acting favors minimal strain, because the camera can transform thought into action. Harris portrays a free-spirited yet quick-calculating middleman with playful wit. Góra works wonders in making Nel, who is on her home turf and facing the routines of daily life, a practical foil for the ardently impulsive voyager Bethany.
Melodrama is at the center of cinematic modernism because it’s ordinary life with a twist—which is to say, an intrinsic blend of documentary and artifice. Ohs, further simplifying the “Voyage to Italy” template by ditching the car and relying on public transportation, has made a cinematic city symphonette that harmonizes those built-in oppositions. Rossellini’s film is part of a distinctive canon of modernist melodramas that self-consciously acknowledge the tension of those oppositions and foreground their symbolic disruption of realistic conventions. “Erupcja,” with its intimate drama expanded across tectonic dimensions, takes its modest yet assured place among them. ♦
