This year’s Cannes competition slate didn’t have much in the way of universally acclaimed entries, with many high-profile filmmakers dropping divisive, polarising work, but one thing that did seem to unite both the jury and the attending critics was a passion for Oliver Laxe’s Sirat. With it now arriving at the London Film Festival, it’s not hard to see why. Despite its flaws, this is a film of overwhelming sensory power, cinema used to transport you to a scorching desert, in a haze, and on the back of a hammering bassline.
Set in the Moroccan desert, Sirat mostly follows Spanish father-son duo Luis (Sergi Lopez) and 10-ish year old Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona), as they search for Esteban’s older sister who has been missing for five months but was last seen traveling with desert ravers in the area. It’s a world that is completely alien to Luis, but one that slowly adopts him as one of its own as he proves his tenacity in his hunt for his daughter. This quest is transformed and made much stranger, though, when the army turns up to one of the raves, essentially announcing that World War 3 has begun and that nowhere is safe anymore, pushing Luis, Esteban, and the truly hardline ravers deeper into the desert on a trip there’s probably no coming back from.
The first thing Laxe wants you to feel is the noise. As ranks of speakers are set up, music that is barely discernible over its own bass pummels into cliffsides and sand dunes, sound given physical, visceral force. Even after the speakers are packed away to head further into Morocco’s desolate deep south, Kangding Ray’s relentless soundtrack remains, sometimes punishing, sometimes more ethereal, always majestic. Though the sonic focus is paramount, Sirat is no visual slouch either, its camerawork lurching through the desert like you’re on one of the trucks yourself while nighttime scenes are simply staggering, surreal and eerie and painterly even in rapid motion.
The film’s title refers to the bridge between heaven and hell in Islamic cosmology, a bridge all its characters eventually have to cross in one form or another, particularly in a harrowing final third. If there is a moment where Sirat’s spell was slightly broken for me, it was here; the climax is undeniably tense and stressful, but I felt it pushed into being overextended and then there’s not really an ending to speak of, more just a fading away.
Then again, maybe that’s fitting for a film that leans further and further into the apocalypse as it goes – the end of the world does not come as one grand, shared finale, but instead arrives through endless stress, anxiety, and fear that gradually pulls civilisation and community apart. Sirat is a bleak and strange film with a singular point of view, rolling unstoppably along through a world of deafening noise, dwindling fuel supplies, and European hippies, a Schengen Area Mad Max and all the brilliance and bizarreness that implies.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 