What are you willing to sacrifice to feel free? What lengths will you go to remain part of your chosen community? And when the end of the world comes, which is better: choosing a path that promises safety, or gambling instead to find a way to continue dancing and live life to the fullest?
French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe explores these and other existential questions in his powerful new film Sirât, winner of the Cannes Jury Prize and nominated for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards. Set within the international rave culture in the desolate regions of Morocco, the story’s plot begins as a straightforward mystery. Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) are searching for his young adult daughter, with whom he lost contact months ago. Why she left Spain, or how their quest brought them to Northern Africa, is never specified. They believe she may be attending one of the pop-up rave parties happening here in the desert. We watch as they hand out flyers of the missing girl, and register the pair’s differing reactions as they wander into this unusual world of disparate people linked solely through dance and music. Snaking through the dense crowds, the young son is clearly intrigued. Nomadic dancers move with abandon in a trance-like state. Non-stop beats pulse from pillars of dusty speakers, their sound echoing off the red walls of the canyon. Luis, meanwhile, looks lost and nervous amidst this ecstatic surrounding, like Pentheus joining the revellers for the first time in a real-life version of The Bacchae.
But as Sirât unfolds, the narrative grows increasingly metaphorical, and the action takes on a distinctly spiritual flavor. Luis and Esteban befriend a small group of ravers who suggest their daughter might be at a different one, deeper in the desert, and even further away from familiarity. After making the leap of faith to follow these strangers into the unknown, father and son learn new definitions of community, freedom, and sacrifice–often with a high price, and in ways they (and the audience) do not expect. Laxe’s film chronicles journeys that are personal and internal, not merely geographic. The brutal desert landscape becomes an interzone of divestment; how far are these people willing to go to find family or connection? What will each need to give up?
Laxe signals his transcendent ambitions right from the start: the film opens with projected text explaining that, in Arabic, sirât means the bridge between hell and paradise. It is a path, we are told, which is both narrow and as sharp as a sword. In the cinematic narrative, dancing is spirituality; the “need to rave” is almost religious in meaning for its devoted participants.
Much of the action in the film occurs without dialogue. The opening fifteen minutes plunge the viewer into the world of the rave, and many key scenes occur in silence, bringing an almost mythic heft to the narrative. Laxe cast hundreds of people from the international rave culture scene to be in the film, which adds a rich layer of authenticity. The line between artifice and reality becomes more porous and thin as Laxe’s camera lingers on their sweaty bodies dancing beneath the blazing sun. Individuals become one in this collective. Their consciousness is clearly altered through the prolonged physical exertion and the pulse of the music, as well as the drugs they ingest to further unshackle them from reality. These rave scenes clearly evoke whirling dervishes and Asian mysticism (Laxe has said in interviews that he is a practitioner of Sufism).
Mauro Herce´s cinematography frames Sirât in gritty immediacy, almost like a documentarian. Unlike the historical film The Testament of Ann Lee, released the same year and which also draws inspiration from rave culture, Laxe wants us to see his characters as alive and present. Their dancing is simple–they oscillate their spines and raise their arms above their heads as they stamp their feet into the sand–but filled with unmistakable reverence and joy. The ragtag style of the raver’s clothes and the extensive tattoos covering their limbs may evoke George Miller’s Mad Max universe, but Sirât is a metaphor about our current moment.
Images of the desert have infused the world’s religious texts for millennia. The environment of Sirât is both sacred and merciless, as if the gods have grown indifferent to Luis and the others’ fate. Laxe peppers his film’s visual vocabulary with numerous religious references: in addition to Sufism and numerous leaps of faith, his camera makes sure we see the shape of the cross embedded in the sound speaker. And while the rave initially offers an image of a kind of kinetic sanctuary, by the film’s end, this same spiritual path is characterized by danger and pain. At one point, Luis walks into a literal minefield; the only path through, he will discover, is to “not think about it” and close your eyes–to listen for that “narrow and sharp” way out. These images are some of the film’s most powerful and lasting. As we hear fragments of reports from their radios about the larger world falling apart, this small band of people survives through a newfound faith that resists easy summary.
Sirât is a skeletal film, the bones of its plot bleached in the desert heat. The backstory of these characters is minimal, and the action compact, similar to Santiago in Hemingway´s The Old Man & the Sea. The rave is holy, maddening, treacherous, and essential: humans have turned to dance for generations as a haven from the harsh facts of living. Dancing, like spirituality, can provide relief as well as anguish. Does this mean we should stop? Sirât offers no pat answers. Laxe invites us instead to enter our own personal desert and find our own bridge between heaven and hell.
Directed by Oliver Laxe
