Six years later Come the fire, awarded the Award for a Certain Look, Oliver Laxe raises his new film Sirāt in the official selection and step by step towards the Palme Gold. We can already assure you that it will be the most flat work of the Cannes festival. While a father engages with his son on a journey to find his eldest daughter, disappeared in a rave party at the gates of the Sahara, he slides into a universe where falling is a constant process. We came out numbly from the projection, as inhabited by the feeling of a collapse that is no longer to come, but long after us. Amazing in the literal sense of the term.
Interview with Sergi López at NIFFF
Dancing under acid
Inspired by the bridge Sirāt which, in Islamic tradition, becomes more and more narrow until it separates hell from paradise, the film of the French-Spanish filmmaker borrows so much from Mad Max than Salary of fear. Authentic flight forward with the only instruction to never stop, the trajectory of Sirāt is straight. Road movie initiation, the film starts with a crazy sequence giving to see the first moments of a rave party that will never really stop. Confounding with realism, we melt into the mass, as if we were ourselves caught by the technival.
RCA cables entangled, a sound system as massive as a mountain and some connections later, a simple fixed plane on the crowd by trance challenging the sound wall. Sirāt is an extraordinary experience and inseparable from its OST, where deep synthesizers and basses raise the BPMs until they resonate with bodies and souls. Oliver Laxe explains how decisive his collaboration with David Lettelier was:
« I had never before had the opportunity to express music with such precision. I wanted to make a sound trip: from a raw, visceral, almost mental techno, to a clean, almost immaterial atmosphere. Reach this place where the sound breaks down. »
We have often been able to compare some films with acid trip, so that the word has become somewhat gallved since. And yet, we have the impression that we've had a well-measured blot, just enough not to distinguish the techno bass from the spin of the engines and the storm that rumbles behind the cracked bed of the camtars. Oliver Laxe's film is radical. Economy in dialogue, Sirāt se contented by a natural decor composed of infinite desert panoramas. Filmed in 16 millimetres, the crumbling grain of the image immediately recalls the first Mad Max (read our folder River). The filmmaker promises a film without fireworks, where the line of the horizon trembles, uncertain, under the heat of the tropic of cancer.
Death in the Kits
While the first rave was aborted by the Moroccan army's invasion, some hoops took the powder from the camp. In their path, a father and son will follow this unlikely convoy that winds the desert to the borders of Mauritania. At any rate, this crippled team, in the figurative sense of the literal term, will confront the roughness of the real, without ever thinking for a moment to turn back, even to burn the wings. The music, omnipresent, makes us switch to a completely different dimension. This is also recalled by one of the protagonists of the film when it repairs old worn amps that she loves for their imperfections.
What better than trance to include leakage by taking psychotropic and eternal trampling of the teuffeur. If the raves take part on the margins of the cities, it is good to escape the morosity of a real that dominates. In Sirāt, it is never really known whether these marginals are fleeing the horror of the world or planning to a desirable future. At the very least, it is a matter of successfully suspending time to find oneself. « We live in a deeply Thanatophobic society that has expelled the death of his heart » explains Oliver Laxe thus recalling Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. Our society has made death invisible:
« Even the most essential rituals to experience it and integrate it into our life have been outsourced. Institutions automatically carry them out. How can we revive death in today's world? How can we accept the lessons she gives us? These are questions that I constantly ask myself, and I believe that cinema is a good place to relive these experiences. I would like Sirāt to move us and push us to look inside. »
Fireflies survival
Oliver Laxe also chose an original casting, largely composed of mutilates. Whether it is the father who tirelessly searches for his missing daughter, or the teufeurs who lack a piece of leg or arm, each has lost something. Dancing under acids is not a choice, but rather the fruit of a nervous signal; The permanent movement, however, is dictated by the logic of the destruction-repair couple pushing to look inside rather than outside.
Minimalist, the film of Laxe proceeds by subtraction. As the film moves forward, it tightens to the image of the bridge Sirat. Oliver Laxe signs an introspective film by this metaphor for a world that is consumed every day. However, we must stay on course, like the motorized convoy of Fury Road. If we had to summarize Sirat In one image, it would be that of this plan that fades, passing from this small troupe lost in the desert to the heart of the bass box acting as a tunnel at the uncertain end. Sirāt is a brilliant work that we are already looking forward to seeing again in the room. Seriously a candidate for the Golden Palm, the film by Oliver Laxe is an invitation to think of the coming collapse. Like small boxes of L that open the doors of perception, Sirat recalls that a simple device can hold on a post stamp. The story lies in a few fragments of dialogues without fioritures and a mystical atmosphere. It's simple, we haven't escaped so much since Enter The Void.
We must appreciate the whole measure of one of the most beautiful replicas of the film when one of the crippled seems so little surprised at the moment when the radio announces the Third World War: « I don't know what it feels like, but it's been the end of the world for a long time. » Answers the wheeler before turning off the radio station. Sîrât However, it is not – exclusively – pessimistic, as one of the first sequences of the film recalls, where a laser door is drawn on the front of an immense cliff evoking that of the horror ceremony of Midsommar. Even though we move into a minefield, « light enters through cracks » answers the filmmaker to the turpitudes of our time. Like the possessed of the dancing plague of 1518, the broken souls of Sîrât continue to dance, straight up, against winds and tides, until night and day merge.
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Thank you for this article that gives me a hell of a craze (and "Old Fire" will make me wait until it comes out, I'm glad to see it) !
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