Sirāt helped me grasp something that now seems obvious: among art forms, film most closely approaches the dream. Prose approaches consciousness; music emotion; visual art… I don’t know, something else, intuition? Of course, some filmmakers are covert novelists, playwrights, or painters working with a camera. Adaptations, even those made by dreamy filmmakers, can never quite make it to dreamland without betraying their origins. (Just compare Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a great adaptation, to a film like The Master.) There’s something intrepid about a film that could not cohere in any other form, which is the case for Olivier Laxe’s Sirāt.
The film is not for the literal-minded. There are plot holes, unanswered questions, and a blatant avoidance of common-sense tools, like phones. For example: what have Spanish father Luis (Sergi López) and his pre-teen son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) done to find their missing daughter and sister, Mar, before they arrive at a rave in the Moroccan desert? What makes them think she’ll be at the rave? Why has she not been in contact? Have they tried using Find My? Don’t ask.
Their search is thrown off course when a military platoon shows up in the desert valley, shuts down the music, and tells the mostly European ravers that war has broken out and they’ll need to head for the borders. Rather than join the caravan out of the country, Luis and Esteban follow a group of five ravers on back-desert roads in pursuit of a second rave in the south,“near Mauritania,” where they hope to find Mar. Don’t ask about the logic of that decision in wartime, either. The techno bumps and the massive RV trucks roll on through the Sahara.
As in a dream, the dialogue in Sirat feels lightly disjointed from what takes place on the screen. People say things, but they’re inconsequential. Happily, no one bothers to theorize rave culture. The deepness of the bass and images of people moved to dance convey its religious appeal. A shot of pilgrims circling the Kaaba in Mecca makes the same point.
In the desert, an archetypal journey unfolds: the travelers bribe merchants for gasoline, split up at a river-crossing, camp at night, and tell stories. The form and imagery invite associative thinking: Moses in the desert, Jesus in the desert, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Mad Max, etc.
The film’s world is a portrait of our own, but off kilter. A news report on the ravers’ car radio warns of a potential World War III (the film opened at the Philadelphia Film Society a few days before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, for what it’s worth), but they soon shut it off. An international gang of misfits and punks, they speak French and Spanish and English, but want nothing to do with global politics. The two women are androgynous, with ropy muscles and hard faces that are wonderful to look at. They don’t “go to the bathroom” but “take a piss.” The men are goofy, tattooed, and kind; one has an amputated leg with which he performs a vaudeville act, another is missing a hand. All of the ravers are played by non-actors and, as an audience, we’re with the impressionable Esteban, who soon identifies their daredevilry and non-comformity as “cool.” Luis, by contrast, looks like a loveable Spanish dad joke.
About midway through the film, something happens, and the film you thought you were watching becomes something else. (Before this thing happened, I thought to myself, “don’t worry, surely this thing won’t happen.”) After the shift, the shocks continue, and I wondered whether the director had lost control of his movie; but the laxness is pushed so far that, as in a dream (or a nightmare) I began to accept all manner of horrors immediately, without any stage of denial—something impossible to do in reality.
By the end of the film, that pandemic-era phrase “anticipatory grieving” came to mind. Sirāt perceives something in the collective unconscious—and whether or not you believe in that, Laxe clearly does—about the world to come and the horrors that await, which have, of course, all happened before.
Leave a Reply