Sirat
Director: Oliver Laxe
Cert: 15A
Starring: Sergi López, Brúno Nuñez, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Janvier, Jade Oukid, Richard Bellamy
Running Time: 1 hr 54 mins
In the nine months since Oliver Laxe’s stunning fourth film landed to gasps of (mostly approving) bewilderment at the Cannes film festival, critics have been struggling to find suitable comparisons. It certainly shares an aesthetic with the Mad Max universe. Vehicular adventures on precarious roads suggest William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (and its predecessor, The Wages of Fear). I also remembered a strain of post-1960s filmmaking that saw distressed parents searching for lost children or grandchildren among disturbing countercultures. You had that in Milos Forman’s Taking Off from 1971. A better – if more obscure – comparison is the fourth Quatermass TV series from 1979. That is the one where John Mills sought out his grandchild among pseudo-pagan hippies as the world comes to an apparent end.
The apocalypse is also in sight as middle-aged Luis (Sergi López), travelling through north Africa with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), investigates the nomadic rave scene into which his daughter seems to have vanished. One obvious contrast with the examples mentioned above is that the confused square is no longer dealing only with disaffected youths. The travellers – some kind, some awkward, some brain-addled – now stretch across the generations. The ravers try to talk Luis out of following the trek, but, committed to the search, father, son and Pipa, their dog, join the caravan as news reports tell of a developing third World War over the horizon.
The desperate attempt to find predecessors, of course, confirms quite what an original film Laxe, the Spanish director of Mimosas and Fire Will Come, has put before lucky audiences. It does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences credit that the current film’s Oscar nominations come in best international picture and best sound. Best enjoyed in the biggest cinema with the best audio system, Sirāt leans into the ravers’ musical preference with unforgiving relish. Electronic musician David Letellier (AKA Kangding Ray) layers the soundtrack with pounding beats that alternately communicate looming catastrophe and chemically enhanced ecstasy.
To continue the endless orgy of influence, one could see something of a wagon-train movie in the opening third. Tensions rise and fall between the veterans and the new arrivals. Rivers are crossed. The frontier seems endless. Potential disasters are overcome. At one stage, poor Pipa has to be delicately rehabilitated after poking her nose into ordure contaminated with LSD.
It is a compelling, ambling, brilliantly acted opening act that, shot beautifully on film by Mauro Herce, offers no relief to the agoraphobic. Though very much in the European arthouse tradition, the film also admits moments of nail-biting tension. López gets across the sense of a man always haunted by a concern he is tired of articulating. The largely non-professional actors playing the ravers communicate complex relationships with great economy.
[ Oliver Laxe on the making of desert rave epic Sirat: ‘You jump into the abyss’Opens in new window ]
Then, around halfway through, something extraordinary happens. Reviewers have, since the premiere, done a decent job of not even hinting what that might be, but we can say it is something that, according to all the laws of cinema, you are not allowed to do. After that incident, an already eccentric films turns much, much stranger. There is a sense of Laxe abandoning himself to a kind of intellectual catharsis that embraces despair, randomness and the primal scream. Yet the film never loses coherence.
“Sirat” is an Arabic word for road or path, and, appropriately enough, this is a director with a firm notion of where he is going and what he wants to tell us along the way. Some of those messages are clear from a first viewing. Others emerge as the film settles into the brain. This is, for good or ill, the sort of enterprise both fans and detractors will be talking about for years to come.
In cinemas from February 27th