Nominating Oliver Laxe’s Spanish disoriented disembodied drama Sirat among the Top 5 International films in the Oscars list would have been funny were it not so seriously disturbing, considering India’s Homebound was dropped from the shortlist.
Sirat is a seriously fractured and meaningless work, self-indulgent, and absurd in its flights of fancy in the Moroccan deserts where a father searches for his missing daughter with his young son and their dog. This wafer-slim plot is diluted into acres of barren hallucinatory images of partygoers who look like they could do with a shower, dancing in the deserts to Rave music.
Nothing to Rave about, really, when all we can see is endless stretches of sand and a distraught father Luis (Sergi López) going from one partier to another with a photograph of the missing girl. Soon this shapeless rudderless storytelling becomes a road film with Luis and his son following a bunch of rave-ing nomads through the desert in what looks like a pantomime of Mad Max Fury Road .
One of these nomads in legless, another is handless… One looks like the gender correction surgery went terribly wrong, all of them are uniformly lost.
Halfway through this journey to nowhere, a terrible accident happens. Luis is left alone with the travellers who begin to blow up, one after another, in clumsily staged explosions.
Sirat is trying to say something. We don’t know what it is. Maybe this is meant to be a discourse on the nullity of existence. Maybe the characters are not real, but mere illustrations of what happens to people who party too much. Or maybe the partying (such sweet sorrow!) is representative of the human urge to purge the soul of its frightening aloneness.
Whatever this is, it doesn’t work. I am surprised it fooled the enlightened members of the jury. Maybe they smoked the same thing that the characters of the film did.
