Oliver Laxe leads his audience into a wilderness of non-meaning in this strange and unrewardingly oppressive film that was the joint jury prize winner at Cannes this year and the recipient of all sorts of critical superlatives. For me, Sirāt is the most overpraised movie of the year – exasperating and bizarre in ways that become less and less interesting and more and more ridiculous as the film wears on.
There is a moment of tragic horror halfway through the action that is not absorbed or clarified and whose (presumed) emotional and spiritual consequences are not conveyed. It simply looks coercive and even slightly farcical. The later explosions in the desert are, frankly, Pythonesque. And yet, as with Laxe’s earlier film Mimosas there are some wonderful visual moments and stylish shots of the Moroccan desert landscape. Veteran Spanish actor Sergi López gives Sirāt some ballast.
Sirāt is the Arabic word for the narrow, perilous path that takes you to paradise, and there is something interestingly ambiguous about the teeming crowds of people we initially see at a rave in the Moroccan desert. It’s a bravura setpiece. They look both like Dionysian ravers and lost souls writhing in hell.
Two outsiders show up: middle-aged Luis (López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) with their dog Pipa. (Esteban’s mother is not mentioned.) Luis pleadingly hands out leaflets with a photo to all the people there, asking desperately if they have seen his teen daughter, Mar, who vanished months before and was perhaps at a rave like this. They blearily shake their heads, some appearing faintly hostile to these interlopers, perhaps suspecting some sort of accusation, but some at least show a wary sympathy: Bigui (Richard “Bigui” Bellamy), Jade (Jade Oukid), Steff (Stefania Gadda) and Tonin (played by street-performer Tonin Janvier who has one leg, and later good-naturedly performs a song).
When the army arrives to break up the party, requisitioning the desert for military purposes, and attempts to shepherd everyone’s trucks away on an approved route, Bigui et al defiantly swerve out and drive away, heading for a second party somewhere in the remote vastness. Luis follows them in his car, sensing that the answer to Mar’s disappearance might lie in this direction. But should Luis be searching for Mar? She is an adult and may not want to be found.
Well, the dual narrative possibilities and consequences fade away into nothingness as the story disappears into the sand, as does the question of whether the hippies and Luis could conceivably learn from each other. In their shock and despair after the tumultuous events that follow, they take psychoactive substances and dance to electronic music thumping out of their speakers. The film’s doors of perception remain closed. Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.
• Sirāt is out now in the US, and on 27 February in the UK.
