“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere on the south side of the Atlas Mountains, hopefully approaching Mauritania. Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s latest, is effectively a road movie toward this feeling. Through the Galician director’s eyes, the world ends not with a whimper but with 115 bludgeoning minutes of skull-rattling techno and Fury Road engines.
Sirāt opens with its throbbing score — supplied by musique concrètiste turned techno producer Kangding Ray — just getting set up. The setting is a Moroccan canyon, where free partiers are assembling subwoofers for a guerilla rave. The BPM kicks up, and cinematographer Mauro Herce’s 16mm camera begins to pace around the dance circles forming and disintegrating on the dry sand. He focalizes five white ravers in particular, each portrayed by a non-professional actor and real life free partier of Laxe’s acquaintance: Tonin (Tonin Javier), Jade (Jade Oukid), Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), and Stef (Stefania Gadda). Their clothes are tattered, their faces are weathered, and they dance with abandon.
The film lingers in this space, the score pounding, establishing a point of pure immersion before the camera’s detached position is embodied in the affable shape of Sergi Lopez. Portrayed by this lone professional actor in the cast, Luis steps awkwardly between dancers, tails after his young son, Esteban (Bruno Nuñez), and taps shoulders. Transposing The Searchers to North Africa, our Ethan Edwards is on the trail of his daughter, who he believes may have joined the free partying movement. Without further ado, the military arrives, a general evacuation is ordered, and the five aforementioned ravers slip away from the emergency protocols, Luis and Esteban in tow, bound away from the gathering consensus that World War III has begun and toward the faintest rumor of another rave at the Mauritanian border.
Laxe’s film investigates the metaphysical stakes of the rave at the end of the world with an earnest spirit of inquiry undimmed by the embarrassments of the hippie movement, not to mention the more recent Cyber Truck-ification of Burning Man. He epigraphs the film with a description of the titular Sirāt bridge in Islam, as the path between hell and paradise that is, it bears emphasizing, more narrow than a hair. Refreshingly, Sirāt denies none of the metaphysical stakes of the molly trip, with a sincere belief in the power of sensorial immersion — at the cinema as at the rave — to deliver our woebegotten souls.
Riding along with the merry band of dreadlocked and, in some cases, peglegged outcasts, Sirāt initially dons the heartwarming form of the found family road movie. Esteban, enamored of these free spirits, prevails upon his father to share some of their provisions; later, he has them do his hair up in braids. “I start from the basis that all of us are broken,” Laxe told Film Comment at Cannes. “Ravers know this.” The apocalyptic backdrop is relegated, for the time being, to quickly muted radio broadcasts and the occasional sighting of a parallel line of tanks being transported cross-country.
First eyeing the circles traced by dancers’ shoes in the sand, and later noting the Hajj taking place via CRT monitor, Sirāt is fittingly attentive to the paths we take in life — those prescribed and those intuited; those that lead to death and those that lead to salvation. Indeed, the decisive moment finds Luis and Esteban veering their van out of the evacuation line to follow the ravers’ convoy. Sirāt’s second half, introduced by an extremely late title card, seeks to demonstrate the thinness of this new path, one certainly beginning in hell, though its destination is perhaps less certain. Laxe’s weapon of choice, as ever, is blunt: to show us the hair’s width of the sirāt, he restages The Wages of Fear (1953) truck scene, repeated in Sorcerer (1977), ad infinitum over the closing hour-plus. Through muddy swamps, over mountain passes, and even across minefields, the convoy teeters on. As life’s precarity is held in front of us between clenched fists over and again, Laxe’s film locates a deeper resolve by continuing to plunge ahead in spite of these mounting tragedies.
“I don’t know what it feels like, Bigui,” Josh responds, with regard to the apocalypse. “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.” The film’s image of hell is enunciated with the bold typeface of Gaspar Noé, but it’s Laxe’s faith in paradise that distinguishes Sirāt. All we have is the rumor of a rave, a few minutes of carefree dancing to sustain us, and that must be enough to cross continents. Bearing in mind Midnight Oil’s evergreen question — how can we dance while our beds are burning? — Laxe responds, unflinching: how can we not?
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