We’ve heard of dad rock, but how about dad techno? This Spanish movie, directed by the French-born Oliver Laxe, immerses us in one of Europe’s more curious subcultures – ravers who decamp by the horde to North Africa to party day and night in the desert. But these are not a familiar Ibiza crowd: most are 30-plus, and one or two look as though they might go back to the Second Summer of Love of the late 1980s.
We’re invited to join their generous vibe, backed by a battered sound system, the odd laser and enough deep bass pulsing to rattle the roof of your local Odeon. You might feel the odd curl of the lip at the sight of a gnarly Gen X-er enslaved to EDM half inside a giant speaker, but Laxe seems to know this scene well, and his commitment to its restorative values means that a cynical British viewer will only flash briefly back to Channel 4’s late lamented Eurotrash.
Weaving through the open-air clubbers at the start is an anxious, dead-to-the-music older guy called Luis (Sergi López), desperately seeking his daughter who’s been lost out here in Morocco for months. With him is his son, aged about 12 (Bruno Núñez Arjona). When the Moroccan army shuts down the rave (fairly courteously) and insists on escorting all the Europeans out of the country in a long convoy of vehicles, Luis guns his ropey car off into the sand dunes. He’s tagging along with two other people carriers – a military-style truck and a camper van – that have also vamoosed from the convoy.
They contain five of the getting-on-a-bit clubbers, Spanish and French speakers, who don’t want to miss another rave to the south, “near Mauritania”. A glance at Wikipedia, or even an old copy of Lonely Planet, might have told them that the desert wastes in these purlieus – the Western Sahara – have, for decades, been war-ravaged and mined. But our hardy ravers, plus Luis, seem ignorant of this (as will any cinema-goer not well versed in United Nations affairs).
Instead, violence is threatened by a huge conflict of some vague kind taking place across the globe, which the ravers know about from the radio but to which they pay little heed. This adds an Alex Garland-like dystopian element to the matter-of-fact social observation angle pursued thus far.
The clubbers, after initial irritation, are happy to hook up with Luis and the kid, as befits their mellow mindset. Unlike López (and the young Núñez Arjona), these actors are all “street cast” and are to some extent playing themselves, with the same names. A resolute, punkish Frenchwoman called Jade Oukid is the most striking of them, but they seem interchangeable, and the film doesn’t allow them to flex and develop amid sketchy dialogue and a flat overall register. Their pasts are unknown, though one of them says he’d rather be raving than spending time with his family back home.
People say you shouldn’t introduce a deus ex machina – or the devil equivalent – late on in a movie, but a dune buggy and horses are driven through those principles here. A random tragedy at about the half-way mark is so maximal that it feels like it should end the movie there and then. Yet, without the introduction of any new characters (or any clues about the missing girl), things will go even further south for our meridional questers. In a drama oddly lacking conflict, blind fate is offered as the antagonist during a harrowing finale that offers desert despair to rival that at the end of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924).
Pedro Almodóvar is one of the film’s producers, and Laxe provides visuals that are similar to the straightforward “middle style” of the Spanish master. Maybe he didn’t want to take away from the aural side. The buzz, twang and chomp of the copious techno score (from Kangding Ray) mixes with ambient bursts of sound design (Laia Casanovas), in line with the approach of many modern movies. It all deserves to be heard thorax-throbbingly loud.
You might think these foolhardy EU citizens motoring though the Maghreb might invite a critical stance from the filmmakers, but that’s hard to discern here. If it’s colonialism we’re witnessing, it’s of a peculiarly wounded kind. Indigenous culture is only glanced at – in the film’s title (Arabic for “path”), in the Hajj seen briefly on TV, in some mute locals on a train, and in a glimpse of a fleeing goat-herder (calling to mind Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel from 2006, which also features First Worlders messed up in Morocco).
Sirāt has been liked by many, perhaps in honour of its old-school pop-culture sympathies. Of course, nobody today thinks that the values of the various Summers of Love can solve the world’s problems, as some people once did. Yet even as we see those hopes detonated, this fatalistic, somewhat ponderous fable seems to be saying: we might as well stay in prayerful thrall to the four-to-the-floor beat. Maybe the only thing that’s left to us today, in the words of Leonard Cohen, is to dance to the end of love.
Add comment