Producers: Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar, Domingo Corral, Xavi Font, Oliver Laxe, Oriol Maymo, Mani Mortazavi and Andrea Queralt Director: Oliver Laxe Screenplay: Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe Cast: Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Javier, Jade Oukid and Richard Bellamy Distributor: Neon
Grade: B
This is basically a road movie, but a singular one, set in the Moroccan desert. It focuses on Luis (Sergi López), a distraught father desperately searching for his daughter Mar. Accompanied by his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog Pipa, he’s travelled into the Sahara in a minivan to locate the nomadic ravers he believes she might be with, passing out flyers with a photo of the girl to the revelers gyrating in the camp they’ve created beside a mountain of red stone. His queries are invariably met with negative responses or simply a shrug.
After soldiers arrive to announce that some sort of conflict—perhaps a world war—has broken out and order the Europeans to leave, Luis opts to join a small “family” of ravers—Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier) and Jade (Jade Oukid)—who are going further into the desert to find another rave, despite being warned how difficult the terrain will be.
The first part of “Sirāt”—a word that basically means “way” or “path”—is, to be honest, rather maddening. The near-constant pounding of the music (composed by David Letellier and Kangding Ray) pouring from huge speakers set up like a monolithic wall of sound combines with the ecstatic gyrations of the dancers among whom Luis and Esteban poke around like the outsiders they are to create a visual and aural aura cacophony that’s hardly pleasurable. And the scruffy ravers father and son fall in with—Jade, for instance, wears a bowler hat, Tonin has a prosthetic leg and Bigui is missing his right forearm but has a Mohawk wig—are an odd group of infuriatingly loopy slackers. (One of the moments of personal drama occurs, for instance, when Pipa falls ill from eating the LSD-laced shit one has dropped.)
Yet as they proceed, the bond between the newcomers and the quintet they’ve joined grows stronger. There’s a puppet show that charms Esteban. Luis contributes to purchase hard-to-find gasoline from some locals to continue the journey. The seven travelers share food and water and cooperate in navigating their way over a river.
And just as the film seems to have settled into a loose, improvisatory groove, something happens that changes the tone into a darker, grimmer mode that explains the caption with which it begins: “The Sirāt bridge,” we’ve been told, “connects paradise and hell. And its path is narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword.” Director Oliver Laxe and his co-writer Santiago Fillol remind us of that warning when the ravers’ van gets stuck while trying to cross a mountain pass. Luis joins in extricating the wheel, but a tragedy follows.
The shaken group continues southward toward Mauritania, but despair is in the air; trying to offer a ray of hope, Jade, under the influence of drugs, dances to a mini-rave she devises, only to discover that the area of desert they’ve wandered into its highly unsafe—though no explanation is given for the danger. The travelers are faced with an existential threat and no apparent escape. Yet some of them do, though to what end is unclear.
The cinematic influences from which Laxe and Fillol have drawn are fairly obvious, from “The Wages of Fear” to “Mad Max.” Yet they’ve constructed a film different from any of its predecessors, an audacious road movie that shows that a search for some sort of imagined paradise can suddenly turn into a very real hell. The music, and the imposing visuals conjured up by production designer Laia Ateca and cinematographer Mauro Herce, encompass both in the earlier sections a sense of exuberant abandon and in the later ones a feeling of utter constraint. Laxe’s pacing, combined with Cristóbal Fernández’s editing, captures the turn with aching power.
The performances are also integral to the impact. The ravers are all played by non-professionals and are utterly convincing in appearance and attitude. But Lopez and Núñez Arjona are the film’s beating heart, though the expressive Pipa should certainly not be forgotten.
“Sirāt” demands tolerance and patience—you might be tempted to depart after an hour or so. But if you stick it out, it will be a shattering trip.