There’s a purity in movement that thumps through the soul of Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât”; a desert-bound saga of one father’s perpetual search for his estranged daughter among the fringe societies of rave and alternative cultures in Morocco. The soundtrack has much to do with this, with the score by Kanding Ray blasting the senses, peeling the synapses, and caravanning the audience along as our found family of dust-crusted misfits traverse the wasteland on the outer edges of an impending apocalypse. You see, these underground communities of music and dance are not the setting so much as the foundational text of the film; as sacred as prayer and as joyous as raising one’s voice in nonsensical tongues. As one of the gangly, tattooed compatriots of our wayward father, named Jade (Jade Oukid), explains while fiddling with a broken speaker incapable of forming the same sound twice, it’s not for listening, it’s for dancing. The term “Sirât” refers to the Islamic belief of a narrow, perilous bridge that all must pass along on the Day of Judgement to enter Paradise; one thinner than a hair and as sharper than a sword. Rest assured, our acid-fried pilgrims are themselves tiptoeing along a knife’s edge, with every choice careening perilously closer and closer to disaster. But as the audience learns firsthand, when walking a tight rope above the fires of damnation, thinking will only get you killed. In the end, perhaps it’s better to just give up making sense of it all, accept your place in the endless abandon, and dance.
“Sirât” opens in Morocco in the midst of an out-of-the-way rave, a more organic Burning Man where there are no influencers, no corporate sponsors, and no helicopters to fly you out when the going gets tough. These doped-up transients in their RV convoys are the pure partiers, denizens of the dance who are truly in it for the love of the game. Luis (Sergi López), along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), ventures through the throngs and fire pits, spreading flyers with the image of his daughter, estranged for five months now and rumored to be among the raving masses coalescing in the desert. He has no luck but does learn about a separate rave happening further inland from a small band of misfits who might be venturing there next. But, before any plans can be made, the local government batters through the encampment and orders all European Union citizens to pick up roots and leave. As radio announcements tell us, it seems that the first silos of World War 3 have been emptied, and society as we know it has turned upside down. As the slow rolling line of buzz harshed ravers begins to exit the campsite, Luis sees two heavy-duty utility vehicles cut away from the rest and high tail it in the opposite direction. Spurned on by Esteban, Luis follows. The group, the same party that told him about the rave the day before, insists that he should go back. The desert is no place for a man like him, one whose vehicle is in no way equipped for the treacherous journey ahead of them. But Luis insists, and the group takes pity on him, accepting his place at the tail of the convoy. Thus begins a lonely descent from the wilds of society into the unknown horrors and lonely wastes of unfeeling dust and rock, in search of a party that might not even exist and the prodigal daughter who is more ghost than memory.
As I watched the creeping dread tiptoe around the edges of “Sirât” I couldn’t help but think of the equally masterful one-two punch of “The Wages of Fear” and “Sorcerer”; remakes of the same source material about a group of doomed men who choose to transport trucks full of volatile nitroglycerine over uneven terrain to help pay for their return to society. Freidkin’s “Sorcerer” seems to be a distant cousin to what Oliver Laxe is aspiring to here, not simply for its comparable descent into a humanity-less miasma, but also for its music. While less textual to the film, the incredible Tangerine Dream score of “Sorcerer” bathes the audience in a spooky, haunted malaise that seems to stick to the backs of your eyelids; a soundscape as oppressive and seductive as the promise of freedom on the far side of purgatory. “Sirât” and its music operate on a similar wavelength, seducing you siren-like along the long march into a Hell of human manifestation. For there are horrors to be found along the trail of “Sirât” that can only be experienced to be fully felt, the kind that lingers and warbles and wedges itself into the deepest crease of your heart. The tragedies that befall our harmless family of radical pacifists are without meaning or intention; it is the chaos of living made manifest on those who deserve its worst impulses the very least. We know little of their backstories, though we can assume their lives are not the happiest. They found love in the dirt, amid the dust, stomping out a beat shared with other ragamuffins and derelicts without a place to embrace them except one of their own creation. Their pasts made them, but the music defines them, draws them together, and satiates the despair in the aftermath of needless cosmic cruelty. It’s a lesson that Luis is forced to learn by terrible means and perhaps one we all might take a page from in the face of our own yawning nightmare that is reality.
The climax of the film finds our troupe in the aftermath of an unspeakable loss. They park their vehicles in the middle of a wide dirt plain, with mountains flanking them on three sides, and haul six-foot-high speakers from storage. As they wander listlessly among the desolation, the music kicks on, and we watch them move to the beat. To call it dancing is perhaps diminutive. They’re channeling. Their past, present, griefs, and triumphs, a community born through singular motion and intrinsic meaning. We watch as Luis, a well-meaning man who accepts these weirdos but is himself much too buttoned up to lean into their mania, falls into the rhythm almost despite himself; his grief at recent events unfurling like so much string held too taught for far too long. We watch them move, stomp, ride the waves of the music in a manner as illogical as it is primal. This is something beyond logic, beyond good sense and coping skills; this is a state of being, perhaps lost in the seismic fallout of modern life, the noise of a world run ragged and on its last legs. Here, on the edge of cataclysm, this mismatched found family, consumed by grief, channels their misfortune, their anger, their collective trauma into a movement as natural as sea foam or wind-blown dunes. When the world makes little sense, what else is there to do but, as Jade cries out above the pulse and the beat, “Turn it up. Blow it up!”
As kind as it is cruel and as transformative as it is simple, “Sirât” is a film that has to be experienced to be believed; a transient trip of human despair and exultation that is eager to take you for a ride down the long, thin road that leads into the deepest reaches of desolation.
Blow it up.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Sirât” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
