Cannes Diary 05: "Sirât" derails expectations

by Elisa Giudici

Film festivals remain the last true sanctuary for an endangered species of film experience: going in cold. Armed with little more than a title, director, an evocative still, or a whisper of plot, you surrender to the unknown. The magic of Sirât is that even this meager intel offers no real map for the territory director Oliver Laxe is about to unveil; not even the most seasoned cinephile will be able to predict the journey ahead. The bittersweet truth, however, is that in describing this film, I am surely chronicling an experience that will be increasingly hard to replicate. Like its protagonists, Esteban and Luis, you must lose yourself in Sirât, allowing the unexpected to detonate within you. But can such a pure encounter survive an age where every narrative tremor is seismically registered and dissected online mere hours after a world premiere?

Nevertheless, I'll endeavor to convey the thrill of what has been, for me, the most electrifying jolt in this year's competition...

I wouldn't bet on it for the Palme d'Or—despite it being, by a considerable margin, the most audacious and original vision —because I find it hard to picture this particular jury embracing such a defiantly unconventional choice. Laxe's film defies tradition and predictability from the outset, even as its foundational plot points might initially seem familiar.

We follow a tired father Luis (Spanish star Sergi López) and his young son, Esteban, as they navigate the Moroccan desert in their sputtering old Seat. Their path intersects with a tide of European ravers, drawn to the desolate landscape to lose themselves for days in the throb of hypnotic, relentless beats. This unlikely pair is on a desperate search for Esteban’s sister, who vanished without a trace from one such desert gathering. Did she choose to disappear, or did tragedy strike? Luis rolls the dice, bringing his son into this alien world to distribute flyers, slowly forging connections within a community whose life philosophy is light-years from his own. Laxe employs a seemingly conventional outsider's lens to bore deep into the lives, memories, and moral codes of individuals who cling to the dunes even as civil unrest boils over and the military moves to expel foreigners from an increasingly perilous zone. There's always another rave, further out, harder to reach. Reaching this next outpost isn't Luis's original mission, but the hope of finding his sister forces a recalculation.

This mirrors Laxe's own fiendishly clever screenplay, which initially appears to chart a recognizable course—the cautious convergence of disparate worlds, the unearthing of shared humanity beneath cultural divides, the bonding forged in adversity. Yet, neither the destination nor the film's core message is what one might initially suspect. Two portents loom over the film. The first is its title, Sirât, alluding to the razor-thin bridge in Islamic eschatology spanning hell and paradise, a passage notoriously treacherous. The second is a casual remark from a raver who has salvaged a faulty speaker from desertion. She tells Luis that each speaker possesses its unique voice, never knowing when it might fall silent forever. It's a poignant metaphor for the human condition itself, in a film that plumbs its most profound and dramatic depths, with these monolithic speakers standing as mute yet thundering witnesses to the characters' odysseys—totems in an absurd landscape, awaiting the ritual of dance.

What makes Sirât so brilliant is its relentless capacity to ambush the viewer, again and again, forcing a re-evaluation of sanity as it’s claimed by both the grieving family and the nomadic ravers. In the end, Laxe crafts a potent narrative about how even the most self-destructive choices, when viewed from the inside, possess their own internal, compelling logic. It’s a stark illustration of how the ache for profound connection—or the agony of its absence—can fuel the most bewildering rationales, or their complete dissolution. As one character chillingly observes, one can be so profoundly altered (by substances, yes, but also by the tidal wave of shock that can obliterate even pain) as to be rendered incapable of thought. Sirât is precisely that: so devastatingly beautiful, so powerful, that as you stumble out of the theater, you're left riding an emotional wave, coherent thought momentarily suspended.

As if that weren't enough, Sirât stands as one of the few genuinely singular films of recent memory, a true original that masterfully subverts audience expectations to build to its staggering crescendo. It dares to use profoundly unconventional characters—defined by their fringe experiences and life choices—as a mirror to the universal human experience, reflecting how even the most seemingly 'ordinary' among us, beneath our veneer of rationality, are prone to acts of blind faith or breathtaking folly, often finding ourselves walking sightless, acutely aware of the precipice, yet cornered by our own momentum, ultimately accepting the risk, perhaps even surrendering to it.