Sirât: an ultra-sensitive and fascinating trip (critic)
The Spaniard Oliver Laxe embarks Sergi López in a crazy and mystical epic in the Moroccan desert, awarded during the last Cannes Festival.
The end of the world according to Oliver Laxe would have a bit like a room by Samuel Beckett, something solitary and absurd who would cause his flocks to an elsewhere where humanity reduced to almost nothing, should demerce itself. The vast Moroccan desert extends its creepy immensity. A handful of men and women will first place enclosure walls at the foot of the cliffs to send big sound and move by saccade to the rhythm syncopated with trance music.
In the middle of the Free Party, a man (Sergi Lopez) is looking for his missing daughter. Accompanied by his young son and a small dog, he distributes design notices, addresses whoever wants/can hear it. Then the army will disperse this raging crowd. This wild hedonism stops suddenly. The world, we understand it through info flashes, is edge of chaos without anyone knowing if it is our present or a postapocalyptic vision to Mad Max (and in fact in this vast zero- Part of petrol will be quickly a subject)
That said, the film traces its route with a handful of Desperados having chosen to rub the unknown. Road-Movie wrapped up and immediately condemned to lead to an supposedly cosmic elsewhere. Although death strikes, brutally. The story fits as you go to keep only one clear line just sufficient to keep us balance and in suspense. Sirāt refers to the disenchanted cinema at the end of the sixties -from the seventies (easy rider, two -way macadam …) supposed to translate the end of just about everything: dreams, hopes, stories …
But Laxe is not in pop bliss, his trip to his, uncompromising does not seek to seduce by fetishization (cf. Daft Punk’s electroma). And if two speakers placed on the sand in the middle of the dodge evoke the Kubrickian monoliths, the mystery that images and sounds produce do not really summon the same metaphysics. However, like 2001, the music when it is heard filled all the space, makes the image vibrate so the story. All our senses in boiling. Our heroes, lost dog punks, are amazed by the violence of reality. They stand standing, advance more and more gently, almost groped so as not to wake up a soil that has become destructive.
Oliver Laxe, a 43-year-old star filmmaker, probe below things The great mystery of existence, “erases the evidence” of an overly identified space-time. His heroes, however, belong to our modern world. The character embodied by Sergi López has the look of the candid in the middle of initiates. However, and this is where the vertigo lodges, everyone is equal to the unfathomable and the immeasurable. Knowing is to recognize that we know nothing. “I went through without thinking! Specifies the astonished hero himself for having reached the other bank.
By identified cinema effects (front zooms, chained melted, etc.), Laxe creates sensitive. There is love in this way that the characters have to watch each other. All around them, the vast zero share spreads his breath. It is covered by the roar of trucks and speakers. Is it this din that brings people back to himself, to his idolish part, and therefore puts him in danger?
From Laxe We had already seen its real-false Doc you are all captains (2010) on kids from the streets of Tangier and especially Mimosas, the Atlas Way (2016), a film-trip which returns directly to this Sirāt. We followed a little crazy man getting lost in the mountains. He trained people after him. His divine belief served as a guide. The Sirāt protagonists have fewer certainties. They still advance. Blind, together. Come what can. The experience is intoxicating from start to finish.
From Oliver Laxe with Sergi Lopez, Bruno Nunez, Stefania Gadda … Duration 2h. Released September 10, 2025
