Sirât

When the title card for “ Sirât” finally appears a half-hour in, you feel its full weight, laid out over an arresting image of a three-vehicle caravan racing through the Moroccan desert. Director Oliver Laxe takes the name of his phantasmagorical Spanish film from the metaphorical bridge in Islamic belief connecting Heaven and Hell, “one thinner than a strand of hair,” and in this shot, he essentially conjures that bridge to life, one his unlikely collection of characters traverses throughout, an ostensible cinematic thrill ride reimagined as a harrowing existential crossing. An unseen war looms just over the horizon in “Sirât,” hinted at in radio news reports and the occasional presence of companies of soldiers, and Laxe initially embeds with a free spirit collective traveling from place to place to hold massive desert raves. That might sound nihilistic, as if they are checking out as the world comes to an end, but rave culture has never been about checking out but plugging in to a sense of community and a larger spiritual pursuit. Laxe embodies this idea through opening shots of a massive sound system being plugged in; he is also asking us, the audience, to plug in too. 

“Sirât” begins by lingering over a rave for a long time, the pulse of the music and the bodies swaying to it, so that when an older man named Luis (Sergi López) finally wanders into this throng of bodies, we can sense he is out of place. He and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are looking for his daughter, Mar, who has gone missing, handing out flyers with her likeness. No one recognizes her, but when one small group suggests she might be at the next rave on the other side of the desert, Luis and Esteban tag along with that same group in the hopes of finding her there. The journey is arduous, even deadly, and though questions are occasionally raised about gas and supplies, it never devolves into the kind of civil breakdown we are conditioned to expect just as the characters never deepen in ways we might anticipate. Narrative and character are sidelined in the name of the experience, and incredibly, through sound design and soundtrack, “Sirât” comes to embody the air of a rave itself, a subjugation of self for something higher, which can sometimes feel impossibly far away, and sometimes so close. When the ravers put on a song, Luis laments he can’t understand the lyrics, to which he is told, it’s not about listening but about dancing, reminding me of the timid clerk Kleinman in “Shadows and Fog” being asked for his thoughts on the nature of existence itself: “Maybe if I get a little drunk, I could dance it.”

Given that the opening moveable rave consists predominantly of Europeans, and that Europeans are ordered to evacuate given the unseen conflict, Laxe buries a wicked tables-turned joke in there. He might have been wise to more fully finesse the politics of this explosive situation; after all, war is the continuation of politics by other means, as the saying goes, and war seems to have brought the world of “Sirât” to this place. By relegating politics, however, Laxe emphasizes the metaphysical, suggesting that once the world has reached an apocalyptic precipice, the how, the why, and the what all become meaningless. All that remains is the world’s cruel indifference and humanity’s struggle not so much to find meaning and serenity in the middle of it as to push past it to find something better. That odd sense of hope ensures that “Sirât” is more than merely a theatre of cruelty. The climax improbably suggests a techno remix of the climax to “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” turning a leap of faith into a walk of faith, a desire to believe in something better to all evidence of the contrary.