“Sirat”: a hypnotic road movie that questions our passage on Earth
Review: Road movie by Oliver Laxe, starring Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona, and Stefania Gadda (Spain-France, 1h55). In theaters September 10th ★★★★☆
By The New Obs
“Sirat” by Oliver Laxe. DISTRIBUTION PYRAMID
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It's a road trip without roads or hallucinations, which gives you chills and a powerful hangover. In the Moroccan desert, Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his 12-year-old son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona, seen in the series "Las Mesías"), in search of their eldest daughter and missing sister, join a community of itinerant ravers. These latter are played by real partygoers with battered bodies - a one-armed man (Richard "Bigui" Bellamy), a cripple (Tonin Janvier) - or burned by existence (Stefania Gadda, Jade Oukid). Fake freaks but true wandering brothers, they welcome Luis and Esteban among them and stick together with what remains of their elbows in the face of danger. Because our extreme revelers evolve on the margins of a world at war, militarized. In this "Convoy of Fear" with a family of punks and dogs, the pulsing of the speakers, the roar of the engines and the beating hearts of the characters echo each other.
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We won't say more about "Sirat," winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, fueled by the unexpected and sentimental fuel. Its essence: the absurd tenuousness of our passage on Earth. Sirat, according to Islam, warns the credits, is "the bridge between hell and paradise, thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword." A narrow thread that separates our lives from death and this metaphysical survival from the laughable. From the alternation between plot twists and contemplative moments set to Kangding Ray's soaring techno to the rare, very down-to-earth dialogues, where the characters' dismay in the face of the grim reaper is expressed, the film doesn't shy away from going off the rails. It sidesteps them through the humility of its direction, hypnotic without being flashy, its approach both mystical and very concrete. And while his quest for new territories (narrative and spiritual) is not without its challenges, its symbolic and emotional reach is a winner. Its author, the Franco-Spanish Oliver Laxe, steeped in Sufism, ploughs a furrow already at work in "Mimosas, the Way of the Atlas" (Grand Prize of the 2016 Critics' Week): the enigma of our place in nature and among the living. Above all, it crystallizes a very current sensation of being in the world, on the edge of chaos. He is free, Laxe!
