Luis (Sergi López) strides into Sirāt looking like an uninvited chaperone at Senior Week. It’s not that he’s that much older than the crowd of nomadic ravers he’s winding his way through, at least one member of which is, like Luis, there with a child. It’s that he’s just so much squarer, his sensible T-shirt clinging awkwardly to his barrel-like torso, a backpack slung over his shoulder, a concerned expression on his face. The partygoers who’ve gathered in this arid stretch of southern Morocco, setting up walls of speakers in front of a dramatic cliff face onto which they project a laser display, are there to dance, to commune with the throbbing music for marathon sessions that take them through the night and back into the morning. They’re the kind of people who might describe themselves as citizens of the world (or the dance floor), hippie-punks in piercings and ink and rakish hats who beam at one through a haze of techno-idealism and drugs. But most of them are actually from Europe, like Luis, who’s traveled from Spain with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and their dog, Pipa, in search of his grown daughter, Mar, who they haven’t heard from in five months. The crowd’s bohemian bliss hinges on the assumption that they’re welcome wherever they go, a conviction that becomes shakier the more that Sirāt goes on.
Sirāt, a mesmerizingly uneasy film from Galician director Oliver Laxe, sets up a devastating narrative feint. Sitting through its first half, you develop a reasonable certainty that you know where things are headed according to the established rhythms of movies, so long as you disregard a few insistent discordant notes. Then Laxe pulls the rug out from under his characters — or maybe it’s more appropriate to say he lets the ground crumble under their feet, as though what they thought was solid earth that they were frolicking on was in fact just the thin crust on top of a sinkhole all along. The film, which Laxe co-wrote with Santiago Fillol, operates as a thriller, through the tension, for a long time, is just ambient, an unclear source of stress dogging the makeshift caravan that forms when Luis, against all sound advice, decides to follow a few of the trucks across the desert in his unsuitable minivan in search of another rave that’s supposed to be happening farther out in the Sahara. It seems, for a while at least, like it’s coming from the tension between the bourgeois Luis and the partiers he impulsively hitched his and Esteban’s fate to, but doesn’t trust.
López is a veteran actor who’ll be familiar from his roles in Dirty Pretty Things and Pan’s Labyrinth, but for the ravers, Laxe cast a collection of charismatic nonprofessional performers from actual roaming dance-party collectives. They emerge as individuals from the larger crowd gradually — the impish Bigui (Richard “Bigui” Bellamy), with his missing arm and mohawk toupé, the matriarch Steff (Stefania Gadda), the sly Tonin (Tonin Janvier), the watchful Josh (Joshua Liam Herderson), and Jade (Jade Oukid), the most striking member of the group with her asymmetric hair and deep eyes, and the one most prone to extend a hand toward the wary Luis. This carefree roving found-family collective might as well be a crew of aliens for how much their lives diverge from that of Luis, who’s clearly out of his element. He struggles to set up a tent with Esteban and clearly sees them at first as a group of flaky degenerates, especially after Pipa accidentally doses herself with LSD after finding and eating one of the group’s post-trip poops. But the ravers help Luis and Esteban ford a stream when it doesn’t look like their car will make it, and share food and bond over exchanged intimacies, and soon Steff is giving Esteban a cool undercut, and Jade is talking to Luis about a blown speaker she saved, which operates handily as a metaphor. (“They all sound too loud to me,” Luis admits.)
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We know how this goes, except it’s not how Sirāt goes, and with the abrupt busting of a few cinematic taboos, Laxe sends his film careering outrageously into bleaker directions as though all of this cross-cultural bonding were a sweet delusion. Whenever the characters deign to turn the music, a thrumming techno soundtrack provided by DJ Kangding Ray, down and turn on the news, we get indications of what sounds like World War III emerging elsewhere, with a NATO rep talking about “major chaos” and how nations as “allying to one side or the other almost automatically.” The first rave ends because local soldiers break it up with orders that E.U. citizens should evacuate, a declaration the characters ignore in favor of keeping the party going. When we see Moroccan locals, they’re all desperately gathering supplies or traveling with all their items in search of safety, a fact that Luis and everyone else either ignore or are in deep denial about. For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.
