French-Spanish director Óliver Laxe makes his debut in the Cannes Film Festival Competition with a
French-Spanish director Óliver Laxe makes his debut in the Cannes Film Festival Competition with a film that arguably would be better placed in one of the festival’s Midnight slots. Part existential road movie, part apocalyptic sci-fi, it’s a puzzling mix of Zabriskie Point and Fury Road that starts with a bang but ends in a curiously minor key. Some of its images are indelible, in the same way Antonioni’s were in 1970, but Laxe’s major weapon here is his sound design, a weaponized barrage of techno with sub-bass that hits like an earthquake and rumbles in the gut.
It begins in the Moroccan desert, where a crew of misfits has gathered for a monster rave that goes on day and night. This is not a youth-culture party event but something much more stern; it makes The Matrix Reloaded’s Zion rave scene look kind of fun. All the faces are etched and grimy, with dreadlocks, colored hair, pierced body parts and body parts missing. Laxe’s impassive camera observes them as they build up their sound system and captures the insectoid ritual that follows, as the crowd moves, like the dancing dead, to a metronomic electronic beat that sounds more pagan than futuristic.
Into this scene comes Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), handing out fliers showing a youthful woman dressed in eco-warrior duds with cropped blonde hair. This is Mar, Luis’ daughter, and Esteban’s sister, who went missing some five months ago and has not been since. Mar is the film’s McGuffin, and Luis’ search for her slyly becomes an obsession more than a quest. Greek mythology is not really part of the film’s vocabulary, given the North African setting, but there are overlaps here with the myth of Orpheus and his journey into the underworld to save Eurydice.
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The bacchanal comes to an abrupt end when the cops arrive — military police, not the regular kind — and declare a state of emergency, ordering all EU citizens to evacuate. Driving a suburban family people mover, Luis obediently joins the shabby convoy of converted trucks heading away from the rave scene. Esteban, however, spots a couple of anarcho-punk travelers breaking line and heading deeper into the desert. They’re going to the next rave, he reasons, and Mar might be there. Luis thinks for a second, then takes off after them, joining the travelers on a threatening flight into oblivion with no road back.
Although it would work sufficiently well on its own terms, from here Laxe’s film starts to bring in the backstory of how these characters came to be here. Their world is on fire and they’re hiding from it, living a self-sufficient existence off the grid, one that involves haggling for gas from roadside Bedouins, who transport it in cans on their donkeys. The radio, which the travelers listen to with detached amusement, announces that “World War Three broke out in the night,” causing one of their number to wonder, glumly, “Is this what the end of the world looks like?” Whatever this war is, it means nothing to the travelers, who become more isolated until, in the film’s strangely surreal penultimate section, the war finally catches up with them and takes everything away from. Not that they have much, apart from forceful psychedelic drugs — and their music.
Key to all these strange details — which include the fact that this world speaks in Spanish, French, English and Arabic, often all at the same time — is the film’s title, a reference to the Koran and explained in the film’s opening scenes as a bridge that connects paradise and hell (said to be “thinner than a strand of hair” and “as sharp as the sharpest knife”). At the beginning, that significance is effortless to miss, but by the end, Luis’ journey has taken on seriously mythic dimensions. Laxe doesn’t quite land the ending, effectively a switch-and-bait that promises large beats and action then delivers some silent time for introspection and meditation. Along the way, though, it’s certainly a trip, a fresh way of framing family and loss, with a killer soundtrack for the hardcore.
Title: Sirât
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director: Óliver Laxe
Screenwriters: Óliver Laxe, Santiago Fillol
Cast: Sergi Lopez, Bruno Núñez Arjona, Jade Oukid, Tonin Janvier, Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda
Sales agent: Match Factory
Running time: 1 hr 55 mins
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