Now Playing: Sirāt

Hi,

As longtime subscribers know, I almost always include films that are screening at the Ross in my weekly events newsletter. I appreciate that the theater programs interesting, sometimes obscure stuff — films that rarely show at our local Marcus joints. While I sometimes joke that the smaller screen feels a bit too much like a college lecture hall, the Ross is still the closest thing we have to an independent art house cinema. I like it a lot!

One of my goals with This Week In Lincoln is to improve coverage of local arts and culture and that includes film. In an ideal world, Lincoln would have at least one decent, locally owned daily newspaper and an alt-weekly, instead of a rapidly withering, corporate-owned daily newspaper and no alt-weekly. Historically, those kinds of publications have been really important spaces for cultural criticism. Newspapers used to have, not just local book reviewers, but also local theater and museum critics; not just local music writers, but also dining columnists, humor and nightlife columnists.

And of course, newspapers used to employ film critics! Not so much anymore. (There's probably only five or so full-time film critic jobs left in American media and most of them are at the New York Times. Most film writers today are independent freelancers juggling multiple gigs, some of whom may not even get paid for their work.)

These kinds of cultural opinion writers weren't restricted to writing about hyper-local or even regional subjects, of course. Your newspaper's local film reviewer would almost certainly be writing about the same big blockbusters that every other writer in the country felt compelled to cover. But their commentary was still grounded in their communities; these critics were writing for their neighbors, not for an amorphous (and potentially infinite) online audience. They sat in the same theaters as you, and reviewed movies that you actually had a chance to see. You may have vehemently hated their bad taste, but maybe you drank at the same bar and still had the chance harangue them about their bad taste in person.

I'm only one guy and can only do so much. But I'd like to try and resuscitate this spirit of local cultural writing. So as often as I can, I'll be reviewing new films that come to the Ross. It's an ongoing series that I'm tentatively calling "Now Playing."

I can't promise that I'll write about every single new release, though if you sign up for a paid subscription (hint hint), you'll help find me more time to do so. My goal is to cover most of the films that will be playing for at least a week. (I probably won't be writing about the one night only special screenings.) And hopefully, whether you like my opinions or not, you'll at least get a sense of whether the films I include in my event roundups would be worth your time.

'Nothing but dust here': Sirāt

If you wanted to be critical of Sirāt, the new film from French-born Spanish film director Óliver Laxe, you might say that it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The film constantly adopts and discards narrative modes, cycling through a wild array of different options over the course of its 114 minute runtime. You could plausibly call it a found-family roadtrip movie or a film about fatherhood and grief. But it's also an apocalyptic disaster scenario — though the precise contours of the disaster (some sort of vast military conflict) are kept vague — and an observational, almost documentary-style portrait of rave culture in Morocco.

This approach, while jarring at times, does lend Sirāt a strange, paradoxical coherence. The film unfolds according the logic of a dream — or perhaps the logic of a nightmarish LSD trip. Storytelling and character development aren't really the priority. Even the motivations of the central characters — a man named Luis and his son Esteban, who are searching for a family member rumored to be at a rave — feel tenuous and abstracted, just barely plausible enough to serve as a narrative hook. (We never learn why they are searching, just that they have "no choice.") The rest of the characters are little more than brief personality sketches, people without context or history, whose main drive is, first, to reach the next rave and, during the film's final act, to survive.

The film's appeal, then, is not its story but instead its propulsive energy. Sirāt is powered by an overwhelming, visceral soundtrack, and if you have even the slightest interest in seeing it, you've gotta go to the theater, or find yourself some massive subwoofers. The electronic rave beat drowns out dialogue for the first ten minutes, which feels like a clear statement of the film's priorities. This is an audio-visual experience meant to overwhelm your senses, to get inside you and obliterate your consciousness. As one of the characters says of the music: "You don't listen to it. You dance to it."

I've never been to a rave on any continent, so I can't speak to whether this portrayal is accurate. But the idea that you're meant to surrender yourself to the music permeates the film. At times, raves seem like spaces of communal belonging. Some of the most striking shots of the film are images of people dancing in unison, their bodies bound together by the unrelenting beat.

Yet Sirāt is also bleak. Characters aren't just subsumed by the rave music: They're also wiped out in shocking, violent deaths, almost at random. The film has moments of tranquility, but it's charged with an undercurrent of anxiety, especially after the dying begins. The climax is perhaps the most harrowing thing I've seen on screen in a long time. It's just a simple, unbroken 90-second shot of two characters walking across the desert, but the film manages to imbue the moment with a stupefying amount of tension — in part because you truly don't know, in that moment, whether they will live or die.

Got an event you want to see featured in next week's event roundup? Submit it here. You can also send feedback, suggestions, compliments, criticism and ideas for things I should write about to tynanstewart@proton.me

Please share the newsletter with your friends! Word of mouth and your recommendation really helps this thing grow.

And speaking of films, I'm also on Letterboxd for whatever that's worth.

Thanks for reading!

~ Ty