From the Couch: the 2026 Winter Olympics in Review

The last Italian Winter Games 20 years ago in Turin were the worst Olympics of my Olympics-obsessed life. This had nothing to do with the Games themselves and everything to do with my physical health having fallen off a cliff at the start of 2006. Something was terribly wrong with me, and at that point, no one knew what, and so even though I watched the Olympics that year, I watched less of them than usual, and almost all my memories of doing so melted in real time. The only one I retain is U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen’s long program. She was in second place after the preceding short program, but had a reputation for struggling under pressure, and I wanted so much for her to excel. That same day I had been scheduled to see a gastroenterologist who would cancel on me at the last minute, foreshadowing how unhelpful and uncaring he would be, and so, I was already glum when I went to a sports bar with friends. I had avoided Cohen’s results all day, because 20 years ago NBC still showed everything on tape delay, but when she took to the ice for the make-or-break moment, a woman a couple tables over, in the air of someone who only finds fun in ruining everyone else’s, loudly declared: “She doesn’t win.” That is my foremost Turin takeaway: sitting there in that moment, feeling like I wanted to cry and not because I was watching a medal ceremony. I still can’t make peace with that joy-taker in my own mind, though in her wretched way, she encapsulated my experience of the Turin Games: they were ruined before they had even begun.

The Olympics are not just about America, never have been, never will be (should be), but considering that we’re the one making a mess of things in the international order, I admired so many American athletes in Milan and in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the 2026 Winter Olympics wrestling with those mixed emotions, like curler Rich Ruohonen and freestyle skier Hunter Hess. The latter stoked the ire of our know nothing President who in his third-grade syntax deemed Hess a real loser and hard to root for, contradicting his own Vice President’s self-congratulatory banalities about rooting for all Americans despite political affiliation. Hess’s teammate Chloe Kim might be right that we should lead with love and compassion, but occasionally it’s refreshing to hear the candor of someone like Greenland biathlete Ukaleq Slettemark who said of the American President: “I hate him.” Thankfully, Hess did not require a humanitarian visa a la Krystsina Tsimanouskaya at the 2021 Summer Olympics after she criticized her native Belarus, though the President would undoubtedly prefer America to be a place that imprisoned people for being mean to him. It’s an extension of his T*ump brand totalitarianism, described by Thomas Friedman as a Me First policy, an inescapable thirst to infect every aspect of everyone’s daily life, as The Onion once put it. He’s a joy-taker, in other words, that woman in the bar recast as the chief executive of the federal government. And you know what, after waiting 20 years for an Italian Winter Olympic do-over, I decided that I would not let him take my joy.

Joy is virtually inseparable from wonder and wonder is what Dana Milbank of The Washington Post argued in December we all need more of in our lives. His search for wonder was framed through the visual arts and, more specifically, through a program at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. titled Finding Awe. I find plenty of awe in the visual arts – this is chiefly a movie blog, after all – but upon experiencing my first Olympics 38 years ago this month, I innately recognized the quadrennial sporting spectacle as a fount for wonder. And though their all-encompassing nature might seem at odds with slowing down, which Milbank wrote was a crucial ingredient in finding awe, well, I have always viewed those two weeks when the Olympic torch is lit as a chance to slow down, to disengage from the larger world and to center myself, like my favorite snowboarder Maddie Mastro taking a few extra breaths before her next descent into the halfpipe.

I have developed true fondness for snowboarding, not least because its competitors seem to seek wonder as much as medals, and though most of the sport’s terminology eludes me, I don’t really need to understand it to know when it fires my neurons. Indeed, it goes so to show how a “lack of knowledge can be helpful, as National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told Milbank. “That moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder.” The Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Klæbo so empathetically broke away from the pack on the last uphill climb in the men’s cross-country sprint in Cortina that the skiers behind him looked like little kids trying to keep up with dad made me say oh my goodness – well, “oh my God.” In his last race, the revered 50k, Klæbo and his two fellow Norwegians Martin Loewstroem Nyenget and Emil Iversen surged to the lead and spent most of the race skiing by themselves. Milbank wrote about visual art opening portals to our past, and in these images, I felt connected to mine through a painting on our living room wall of three cross-country skiers alone amid the trees, which I always imagined as my dad, my grandpa, and my dad’s best friend. I was transported, watching these three Norsemen ski, even if I knew the idyll belied the coming Klæbo storm. I did not feel tension so much as anticipation, waiting for him to make his move, which he finally did on the same hill as in the men’s sprint, just this time after 2 hours of skiing. In earning victory, he won his sixth gold medal, the most of any one person at any single Winter Olympics ever, though more than that, I will always remember three Norwegians in the middle of an Olympic race looking like they were out for a ski through the woods. 

When I was an impatient kid, I preferred the sprints in long track speed skating, but over time, I have come to love the longer distances so much more and how the skaters’ cool, composed faces at the start gradually become unmasked with each lap of the oval. In the women’s 5,000m, though, the mask of Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida did not just come down, no, the burden of the last few laps became so palpable in her face and in her form that American commentator Joey Cheek spent the last few laps insisting she could not possibly hold her lead, until she did. The whole thing reminded me of the reaction of Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton in the wake of becoming the first woman to win gold in the inaugural ski mountaineering competition: she looked into the camera, smiled, and shrugged, wonder rendered as the inexplicable.

As much as the first Summer Olympics were made in the image of Athens, the first Winter Olympics were made in the image of the Alps, and though the view from on the ground rather than from my couch suggests the experience in Cortina was fraught, the pollyannish parts of my heart yearn for the IOC to work out a way for more such places to host without being ridden roughshod over because these Games benefitted from an infusion of alpine wonder missing from so many recent entries. That wonder was exemplified in the women’s giant slalom. I watched it to see if America’s Mikaela Shiffrin would win gold (she did not, though she won later in the slalom), but then, the Olympics always make your memories for you rather than the other way around. For a time, the giant slalom suggested my favorite ski race ever, with Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund and Sweden’s Sara Hector tied for first, their arms around one another in the leader’s box as if they were just trying to hang on. They needn’t have worried, however, because Italy’s Federica Brignone made the host country proud by making like the tiger on her helmet and roaring to victory by six-tenths of a second in a sport where six-tenths of a second is like an epoch. It was so resounding that the silver medalists did their finest Wayne and Garth – “We’re not worthy!” – by literally and amusingly bowing to Brignone before the trio had the time of their lives on the medal stand, emitting enough joy to power Cortina’s snowmaking system.

If wonder is inextricable from joy, well, in a competitive arena like the Olympics, so, too, is it inextricable from agony. When American Lindsey Vonn ruptured her ACL just before Milano Cortina, she chose to compete in the downhill race anyway, and then crashed 13 seconds in, breaking her leg and getting airlifted off the mountain. If some thought it reckless, or vainglorious, I was awestruck. I thought she infused the jejune phrase the glory of sport, the one in the Olympic creed, with more blood, muscle, and bone than just about anyone. Vivre sa vie. For most of the women’s gold medal hockey game, I did not feel joy or agony, just tension, so much so that I kept involuntarily giggling. Canada led most of the way 1-0, trying to hold off theretofore ultra-dominant Team USA until their captain Hilary Knight read the stage direction in the screenplay and tied it with a couple minutes left, setting the stage for teammate Megan Keller to win the game in sudden death on a dipsy do goal that blew even this hockey agnostic’s mind. And though I will remember Team USA singing our national anthem on the podium, I will also remember Team Canada’s Daryl Watts looking at the stuffed mascot she was handed along with her silver medal with incredulous agony, like she wanted to hurl that stoat all the way to Switzerland. Respect. 

The color of your medal is relative though. Curling in Milan Cortina became mired in minor Over the Line-like controversy, but you will have to read about that elsewhere; I just want to talk about America’s all-Duluth, Minnesota mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse (pronounced: Tee-see) and Korey Dropkin, my favorite team since the 2022 Chicago Sky, and only the third American curling team ever to win a medal. (Thiesse became the first American woman to win a medal in curling.) In advancing to the medal round, they found themselves tied with defending champ Italy late in the semi-final with a chance to play conservatively for one point or aim higher and try to score two. The Duluthians opted for a Vegas mentality, played for two, got it, and that proved the difference in a 9-8 win. In the gold medal match, they found themselves in a similar situation, went big, and poetically, went bust. My oh my goodness became an uff-da. Afterwards, Dropkin remarked, “Obviously would have loved to come home with a gold medal, but Sweden earned that.” The power of the negative in that statement was so purely How to Talk Minnesotan that it brought a tear to my eye. And though some knuckleheads in this country think it’s all about winners and losers, that’s what makes the Olympics so wonderful – the silver lining is baked right in there.

What I have come to love so much about biathlon is how its design, cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting that yields a penalty lap for each missed shot, can allow for races to be totally upended right in the middle of themselves. That’s what happened in the women’s 12.5km mass start when at the last shooting target, almost everyone who was anyone started missing shots left and right, and suddenly Czechia’s Tereza Voborníková, who had never finished on the podium on the Biathlon World Cup circuit, never mind at the Olympics, so unheralded the NBC announcers confessed they had not mentioned or thought about her once during the race, found herself in the lead with a couple kilometers to ski. And that is how I found myself in the middle of the truest Olympic experience: fervently rooting for a Czech I had never heard of 17 seconds earlier. Alas, she could not hang on for gold or silver, passed by France’s Oceane Michelon and Julia Simon, earning bronze instead. And though biathletes typically splay exhausted on the ground upon crossing the finish line, Voborníková looked less exhausted than still high on wonderment. “It was incredible to lead the race for a while,” she said afterwards. “This bronze medal means everything to me. It definitely tastes like gold.” I submit to you, no one went home from Cortina happier than Tereza Voborníková. Well, on second thought, there was one person that might have gone home happier. 

20-year-old U.S. Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said that in coming to Milan, she did not need a medal, and though that sounds like off the rack athlete-speak, the thing was, to see her skate in the long program, which she entered in third place, was to believe it. I have been watching figure skaters crack under pressure all my life. I watched the self-dubbed quad god Ilia Malinin crack one week earlier. Liu, however, did not skate like someone overcoming pressure or ignoring it; she skated like someone who was completely at peace; she skated her competitive program the way you typically see people skate their exhibition programs in the Olympic-ending gala. In that way of overbearing youth sports, Liu had essentially already lived a whole life, retiring from the sport at the ripe old age of 16 because she had tired of it only to eventually return after uncovering a true sense of self. Coaches are always talking about breaking down athletes to build them back up, but in stepping away, Liu broke herself down to build herself back up as the person she wanted to be. And so, she became the first person with a frenulum piercing to win a gold medal (editor: plz fact check) and quite possibly the first gold medalist with a healthy work/life balance. When she left the ice after her triumphant long program, the one that would ultimately lift her from third to first, and broke the fourth wall by looking right into the camera, she effused, if you will permit me to honor the spirit of the f-bomb she dropped on the whole world, nothing less than pure fucking joy.

Olympic greatness in the genuine Faster Higher Stronger sense is not merely measuring up to your own sense of excellence, but reorienting what is possible for your sport. Ever since I first watched a figure skating competition, the fabled Battle of the Carmens in Calgary, I understood on some level that the sport was about toil, tears, surrender coded as sacrifice, and conceding your own identity to your coach and choreographer. Alysia Liu came along and reoriented the sport as one of joyful, mindful self-expression. Imagine if the whole sports world had the courage to follow her lead. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Fight Without Hate (1948)

As I continue winding my way through all the official Olympics documentaries, there has been one emergent trend: they are rarely weird. “White Rock,” chronicling the 1976 Winter Olympics was eccentric in a cheerful prog rock sort of way, and it was a little strange to hear Don LaFontaine narrate the 1992 Winter Olympic documentary to someone like me who grew up with him as the original trailer man, but neither of those weirded me out. Not like the official documentary of the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. And that is weird in and of itself because these were the first Olympics since 1936, emerging from the unremitting darkness of WWII, none of which is eschewed in “Fight Without Hate” but openly addressed in a nifty prologue that takes us from the first modern Olympics up through Berlin and footage of you-know-who. Granted, even as it shows this, the narration remarks that sport rises above politics which is not quite true and not just because I say it is not. The documentary notes that Korea is only the Asian representative at the 1948 Winter Olympics, forgoing an explanation of why Japan is not present, but surely, viewer, you can guess. Still, you can understand the inclination to lighten the mood, though “Fight Without Hate” takes lightening the mood to the pre-second wave feminism extreme. 

Despite recounting the truly extraordinary St. Moritz locations, hockey and skating rinks plunked down before awe-inspiring Alpine vistas, and skeleton and bobsleigh chutes of ice that the movie shows us painstakingly being constructed, what stands out most about “Fight Without Hate” is often not the action itself but the commentary. Director André Michel’s foremost artistic choice, it turns out, was to invent a narrator, one called Gaston, who not only adds cheeky fashion commentary and cracks jokes but throughout his narration is also forced to deal with his nagging wife, one who keeps interrupting him to ask questions that he waves off with no small amount of sexism. It’s like you’re watching the Olympics with a Blondie comic strip running concurrently next to it. Indeed, at one point Gaston notes that someday the athletes’ uniforms might “appear naïve and old fashioned,” not realizing he’s referring to himself. It was a different time, as they say, and that is certainly true: it would be 12 years before speed skating was added as a medal event for women, and it would be 66 before ski jumping was added. What would Gaston make of that?

“Fight Without Hate” works better when it puts its cheekiness toward the actual coverage of events, like situating a camera in front of a bobsleigh so that we get a point-of-view shot the whole way down the track. Michel showcases the downhill skiing event with aerial shots and wide views that not only capture the many spills and tumbles but provides thrilling context as to just how massive the vertical descent for this event really is that even modern television coverage can never properly evoke (at least, not until NBC’s drone shots here in 2026). And for a surprisingly long stretch during figure skating competition, “Fight Without Hate” indulges in nothing more than a montage of the skaters’ twists and turns. It might be lyrical overkill for some viewers, it might have been lyrical overkill for me, but it’s also the one sequence where Gaston finally shuts up. 

In Memoriam: Robert Duvall

It’s funny what sticks in a person’s head about an actor, but when you have a career as long and varied as Robert Duvall’s, maybe that makes sense. He was in “The Godfather,” of course, need I say more, and literally started his movie career as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I mean, c’mon now, and is the guy who said he loved the smell of napalm in the morning in “Apocalypse Now,” for god’s sake, and yet I find myself thinking about the disaster movie “Deep Impact.” There’s a scene where Duvall’s astronaut is at a barbecue and drinking a beer with the NASA flight director (Kurtwood Smith), who is wearing a tropical print shirt, and talking about the crew for the big mission and expressing his fear and the whole thing can’t help but feel faintly ridiculous (did I mention Kurtwood Smith is wearing a tropical print shirt?) and yet Duvall just effortlessly speckles over it with this good-natured chuckle. He had a great chuckle, you know; Robert Duvall’s chuckle was as much an American national treasure as the late Gene Hackman’s. That’s not my favorite Duvall memory, though. No, my favorite Duvall memory comes from the same year, as chance would have it, 1998, in “A Civil Action,” where he’s playing the defense attorney who treats the law not as the rules and regulations helping bind together The Great Experiment but as the rules of a game that can be manipulated to engender a favorable outcome. (5 out of 4 Supreme Court justices rate him as their favorite movie lawyer.) Mostly, though, I just like the scene where he excoriates a clerk for daring to interrupt his lunch break, an argument and elegy for finding shelter from the capitalist storm. It’s the greatest courtroom movie speech of all time and it’s not even in a courtroom.

“You know, I’d make a point of taking an hour or so away from all the noise and insanity of this place. I’d find a place that was relatively quiet and peaceful, have a sandwich, read a magazine. Maybe listen to a game if one was on. I’d make sure everyone knew not to disturb me during that hour. Because that would be my time – my own private time, which no one, if they had any sense of self-preservation, would dare interrupt.”

 

After reading that Duvall had died at the age of 95, I reached for my copy of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film to see what he had to say on the actor. He starts by talking about Duvall’s role as consigliere Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” as I suppose one would, writing that Robert Duvall the actor “relates to high stardom like an Irishman among Italians. He is not beautiful or forceful enough to carry a big film. But stars and Italians alike depend on his efficiency, his tidying up around their grand gestures, his being perfect shortstop on a team full of personality sluggers.” There’s a lot of truth to this, and oddly enough, it’s as much epitomized as it is refuted in Duvall’s great passion project, 1997’s “The Apostle,” which he wrote and directed and starred in as a Pentecostal preacher. Indeed, though the name Elmer Gantry might have Irish roots, Duvall is making the Irishman version of that movie, at least, in the way Thomson is cheekily defining it, resisting the obvious stereotypes, effortlessly evincing firm belief in and devotion to the Almighty despite all the baggage the character otherwise brings. It’s Duvall’s version of a personality slugger. 

Kevin Costner’s 2003 western “Open Range” has a climactic gunfight that tends to get cited as one of the genre’s best shootouts, but I have always preferred the moment just before the shooting begins when Duvall’s cattleman, Boss Spearman, goes into a drug store. “My friend and me got a hankering for Switzerland chocolate and a good smoke,” he says. No one ever seized the day with so little fuss. Costner directed, produced, and co-starred in “Open Range,” yet he downplays, to his own detriment even, ceding the stage to Duvall who in his easygoing jocularity appropriately suggests Walter Brennan taking the lead in a John Wayne joint. Costner might lay the American pioneer spirit on thick, but in the end, the movie is less a sentimental ode to American fortitude and independence than a lasting monument to his co-star. 

Jay Kelly

An aging white male whose life has turned out empty despite so much fame and success is not a new story, but what counts is in the telling. And that is where I am afraid to report that despite some expressive performances and scenes, Noah Baumbach’s telling of the story of fictional movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) ultimately comes up empty, never demonstrating enough courage in its own convictions, and not quite sure whether it wants to be an easygoing Netflix comedy or something more avant-garde that just happens to be streaming on Netflix. Partly a road trip movie in which Jay journeys from Hollywood to Italy to accept a lifetime achievement award at a Tuscany film festival, it’s clear that Baumbach and his co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also features in a small role) are nodding at Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” though what ensues only occasionally seeks, nevertheless reaches, such metaphysical heights. Despite the fictional movie star’s name essentially being a mirror of the real movie star playing him, “Jay Kelly” remains just outside the looking glass, never bold enough to go all the way through.

“Jay Kelly” begins with a bang by way of a long tracking shot roaming through so much chaos and noise on a movie set before ending with the eponymous character having to go in front of the camera and nail a take. It evokes the actor’s paradox, that despite being surrounded by multitudes, when the camera rolls, the actor is all alone in front of it. It also becomes a metaphor for Jay himself, virtually alone, divorced and with two daughters, one from whom he is estranged and one whom he hardly ever sees, with no real friends other than Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler) who is not really even a friend but his agent. Jay is a ghost in his own life, an idea that Baumbach evokes when Jay re-encounters his old acting school buddy Tim (Billy Crudup) from whom, it turns out, Jay essentially stole the role that turned into his big break. Throughout this sequence, Crudup evinces a mischievous gleam in his eye that you can sense is always half-a-second away from turning to maliciousness, and finally does, their catching up becoming a confrontation. Baumbach seems to play this moment for comedy, but Crudup feels realer, and scarier.

If Crudup steals the movie, then Sandler salvages it. Because this journey to Italy is not just Jay’s, it is Ron’s too, forcing him to come to grips with the fact that he has essentially lived his life on behalf of someone else. And though Jay’s publicist Liz (Laura Dern) decides to walk away from this life, Ron cannot bring himself to, seeing Jay’s career as an extension of his own. It is an affectingly bittersweet character and performance that puts into perspective why actors are always thanking their agents in award speeches whether you like it or not. In a way, the complexities of Ron and his devotion work to explain the emptiness of Jay, but only up to a point. Jay is deliberately written as an empty vessel, a person whose only memories, as he says, come from his own movies, a notion that Baumbach literalizes in flashbacks staged to feel like movie scenes with Jay standing off to the side, as if appraising them. If the emotions these scenes generate can feel pat, they are at least baked in an interesting filmmaking idea, which is more than I can say for how Baumbach treats Jay Kelly as what he nominally is: a movie star. 

Jay never comes across larger than life as intended, illustrated in a scene aboard a European train where he is gawked at and talked to but never in a way that borders on the edge of mania: he feels like, gosh, I don’t know, Charlie Hunnam, not Tom Cruise. What’s worse, Baumbach never infuses a sense of Jay’s work, meaning we never see his onscreen persona contrasted against his real one, to see the gap between the two that ostensibly is supposed to be his emotional fault. All we ever see is a quick highlight reel at the award ceremony and all those highlights are culled from real George Clooney movies. A genial nod to the actor, it might have suggested something more, erasing the lines between actor and character until we realize they are the same, but “Jay Kelly” is not reaching that high and it never seeks to tease out that thin line anywhere else. It is as if by walking up to the edge of actor and character being the same, Baumbach becomes afraid to push it too far, given the unlikable qualities of the character, tying his own hand behind his back, always a little too eager to redeem Jay despite simultaneously suggesting redemption is not so easy. It’s a contradiction he can’t solve, and it causes a closing line that might have landed like a punch to the gut to feel more like a wistful sigh.

Friday's Old Fashioned: IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964

Shot using the German film stock Agfacolor, what stands out most about Theo Hormann’s official documentary of the 1964 IX Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – given the utilitarian title of IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 – is the photographic brilliance of its images. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian (!) jerseys in their ice hockey tilt pop off the screen like they just came out of the laundry in one of those vintage Tide commercials, bobsleighs come across like vibrant toboggans, and the snow looks the way you imagine a snowy day in your mind. Hormann’s movie must have been striking to contemporary viewers, what with the paucity of color television sets at the time, but it’s equally striking to a modern viewer given the omnipresent gunmetal grey of so much prestige TV. The color renders these Olympics as something like a living parade of nations.

IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964, alas, is not, itself, as striking as its images. Hormann recounts myriad events and athletes but tends to provide little context to put into perspective what all this agony and triumph means, citing results here and there like reading from a two-sentence Associated Press recap. The one time he does, with German Georg Thoma overcoming faulty skis to earn Bronze in the Nordic Combined, suggests what the whole film might have been. (I learned from Motoko Rich and Josephine de La Bruyère’s Athletic article about the residents of current Olympic host city Cortina that Gildo Siorpaes won Bronze for the Italian bobsled team at the 1964 Winter Olympics, but that he was an alpine skier at heart and was forced on to the bobsled team against his will and that all things considered, the medal was not that special to him. I mean, there is a story this movie could have told!) Nor is the visual poetry enough to sustain it. When the narrator mentions the rhythm slalom skiers must use to be successful, we are never made to understand just what that rhythm entails, or how it is accomplished. 

Oddly enough, IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 works better away from the competition, like a brief interlude with athletes breaking bread by way of feasting on authentic Tyrolean Holzhackerschmarrn. There is also one heartening passage about Innsbruck itself, the narrator noting how “the mountains peek through the window of the house,” reinforcing what he says elsewhere, and that the images of Innsbruck homes, and businesses, and streets set down in the shadow of the Nordkette manifest, “that in this setting, the link between man and alpine sports seems to have come about on its own.” 

Souleymane’s Story

The title of Boris Lujkine’s French film is not a generic catch-call – as in, this is the story of Souleymane – but a specific reference to the asylum interview of the eponymous character (Abou Sangaré), a Guinean immigrant in Paris. The opening scene finds Souleymane waiting for that interview, harried in his air, a conspicuous wound on his forehead, and then flashes back 48 hours earlier to show us how he got here. That’s a thriller device, and though “Souleymane’s Story” is billed as a drama, like Eric Gravel’s sensational 2021 French thriller “Full Time,” Lujkine sculpts genuine suspense from nothing more than everyday details, the nightly bus that Souleymane must catch at a certain time back to a homeless shelter so he as a bed to sleep in, or else be resigned to the street, the orders he ferries as food delivery courier, and the precious state of the e-bike he uses to deliver them, all in the name of ginning up enough money to pay a so-called Fixer, Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), to outfit him with a phony story of political persecution back home to increase his asylum odds. That last one is an evocative detail rendering Souleymane’s desperate plight as existential, bolstered by his job in which he must pay to use the app of another delivery driver, masquerading as that person while working. And it’s why even if the typical kind of character details that might humanize Souleymane are scant, it’s all for a broader purpose, of demonstrating the dehumanization of the immigration process. When his asylum interview finally comes back around, you might know what’s coming, but the rendering is so gently forceful that is works in spite of the predictability, embodied in Nina Meurisse’s performance as the government agent conducting the interview who tells him with straightforward patience that this is his opportunity to tell his story. And finally, after over a frenzied hour, the movie stops, sits back, and gives Souleymane the floor, a sustained unburdening of the overwhelming stress that comes with concealing your true self.  

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.