Eastern promises: "Erupcja"

Where February's The Moment found Charli xcx representing what she knew - the vagaries of the modern music business - the new indie curio Erupcja, which may not have been made or distributed as widely here without the singer's participation, offers a slightly bigger challenge: an attempt on the singer's part to walk a few hundred miles in another woman's shoes. Pete Ohs' film revives that Nineties strain of American peregrination - think Before Sunrise or Barcelona - which travelled in search of some greater perspective on the follies of romantic youth; it has good ideas and sound instincts, even if the overall execution left me shrugging for much of its 71 minutes. Charli plays Bethany, one half of a vaguely hipsterish London couple who've booked a weekend break to Warsaw in Poland. Unlike boyfriend Rob (Robert Popper lookalike Will Madden), who hopes to propose on the couple's last night in town, Bethany has been this way before - as, surely, has Ohs, sweeping us up on a guided tour of one of Europe's less filmed and therefore less familiar cities. ("I never thought Warsaw would be this green," the wide-eyed Rob remarks, although nothing in the film proves as green as Rob himself.) Bethany's reasons for returning soon become clear. In passing, we meet Nel (Lena Góra), a reluctant florist who lives and works in the city, with whom, we learn, the lovestruck Bethany once had a fling and hopes to reconnect; yet Nel has another lingering ex in Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska, the young nun of Pawlikowski's Ida). Round and round they all go, to the accompaniment of what sounds like a fairground calliope and beneath the all-seeing eye of a Polish narrator (Jacek Zubiel), until the sudden eruption of Mount Etna plays havoc with European air travel and strands everybody in place. Moral of the story: you can't fight nature.

You can see what Ohs is getting at. Erupcja has the neatness of a short story Rohmer might have filmed, coupled to the openness of those early Godard features; it's one of the few films set over a weekend that you can imagine actually being shot over a (busy) weekend, on the hoof, with a skeleton crew gathering at Stansted around a pop star travelling without make-up so as to prevent any onlookers making a fuss. As a drama, it's fairly conventional: young woman caught between dull security (as represented by poor old Rob, with his deeply trad ideas of couples activities and his longing glances at the nearby Novotel) and the romantic possibility Nel embodies. Taking it out onto the streets freshens this material up, as it did back in Godard's day; but I'm less certain that Ohs succeeds in bulking this anecdote out. As so often with early, microbudget works, the performances are variable, governed less by clear and sharp direction than by who's in town or willing to travel and how prepared they are to work for scale (or less). Ohs is at least fairly shrewd in the way he co-opts Charli's emergent screen persona - here's a gal who cares not for the bourgeois restrictions of the brassiere, and really doesn't want to be pinned down elsewhere else; Bethany, indeed, is such a flighty character the film allows her to vanish from sight for much of its second half - but the supporting characterisations come off somewhere between colourless and wan. Much as Charli's not yet a film star in the way she absolutely is a pop star, so too Erupcja isn't an entirely satisfying movie: increasingly, it seems slight - even jejune - in comparison with the films with which it enters into discussion, gesturing towards rich Rohmerian wisdom, but ultimately stuck at an A24 level of depth. It's a pity, as the stronger scenes and stretches here suggest a semi-promising miniature, fashioned in the right adventurous spirit: at this point in time, it's just reassuring to know there are American filmmakers who've retained possession of a passport.

Erupcja is now playing in selected cinemas.