Seeing Sirat is like attending the most shocking rave party

When Kiarostami turned The flavor of cherrylooked at death so closely, and with such honesty, that he ended up making an unforgettable film about what it means to be alive. It is not surprising that Oliver Laxe cites that film and that filmmaker among the sources of inspiration for one of the most surprising and original films of recent years. View Cry it makes you feel alive, because it is a communion between sound, image and narration that makes you feel the warm breath of cinema on your facewhere often you can barely hear the rattle.

Lavish praise aside, talk about Cry means doing a very complicated balancing act, because the ideal condition of viewing the film by the Franco-Galician Laxe is complete and absolute unawareness of what you are facing. So much so that in my acquaintance I didn’t hesitate to play all the cinematographic credit I had to convince people to go to the theater without investigating, seeing trailers, asking anything: a true profession of faith. Seeing a film sight unseen is now a very rare experience: Who enters a cinema anymore, scrolls through the list of titles playing in theaters and points to a random title at the cash desk, perhaps because it’s starting soon? And who under these conditions would choose an enigma like Crywhich right from the title is a mysterious object, a single word that gives no clues as to what it means or where it leads? Exactly how the path to which the term refers: it can be a spiritual path that is followed in the soul or a tortuous, dangerous real path. For some it is instead the bridge that joins heaven to hell (and vice versa): all things considered, this is probably the closest to the truth of the film, though Cry film covers all three. It does so by winding its way the harsh and inclement territories of the Sahara desertwhich Luis (Sergi López) travels, together with his young son, in search of the faint traces of his daughter, a restless young woman who disappeared into thin air, a regular visitor to rave party in the Moroccan desert.

A rave in the desert

Totally out of place and very clueless, in their beat-up Opel and with their dog in tow, the two distribute flyers and ask people in a state of high spirits if they have seen the girl. Cry it’s a desert adventure in search of a lost person, or that perhaps you don’t want to be found, at least at startup. Apparently it is a sui generis road movie, in which two small groups of equally desperate people but belonging to very different cultures join forces to reach the next, extreme, legendary raver gathering. Luis gains the trust of a handful of penniless people who have seen his daughter, they glimpse something authentic in that desperate father, similar to what they find in old speakers refurbished, each with its own sound distortions, which they carry with them and play at maximum volume in the middle of the most incongruous place.

Already like this Cry it would be at least an original film, if it weren’t for the fact that at this point the real film hasn’t started yet. While telling his story, Laxe keeps the handbrake on and when he releases it it’s impossible not to notice. From there it’s all a crescendo of vertigo and adrenaline that comes close to the purest form of cinema: the one that only in the best moments (Kiarostami and co) allows you to connect with the core at the center of yourself, the one hidden under layers of unconscious, subconscious and trauma, under dunes of lies, moved by Laxe’s narrative hammering, by the straight drum of his soundtrack, by the brutal humanity that its small cast forces to face completely disarmed. Thus, safe in the darkness of the room, the director touches on the essence that hides beneath the wounds. Of his characters, of those who observe them.

The cinema of extremes

Like all great films of this type, to get to the final, devastating human truth, Cry he must subject his characters to scenarios and situations that leave no escape. It does so by first stripping away our prejudices towards people who, in different ways, seem deluded, not exactly belonging to reality, first making their pain understood and then suddenly asking: what if you had been right in the beginning? There is a sudden change of perspective that realigns the entire film and all the judgments on the characters, changing the interpretation of desperation which, immediately, is evident in the way these people behave and in the things they say. Laxe is right in saying that cinema is one of the last places, one of the last arts in which a human being can be pushed to such extremes (albeit one who doesn’t really exist) to try to understand who he is and forcing entire audiences to ask themselves the same question and leading them to suddenly feel more alive thanks to the awareness of having also survived what they saw on the screen. The problem is that the one offered by Cry it is a very rare experience. Partly because – objectively – this inquiring look at the human soul is so painful that an artist can afford to take it on only a couple of times in a career, faced with a couple of irrevocably life-changing events (mourning, changes, fixed points that become turning points).

A little because we today, in cinema, in art in general, ask exactly the opposite of Cry: we present ourselves with a book of wishes and ask what we see to fulfill them slavishly, or at least not to do anything too different from what we want, do not deviate from the sirāt of our expectations. And therefore cinema becomes a consolatory, if not masturbatory, art. a place of easy certainties, of surfaces, the opposite of that vertigo you find yourself in after encountering something unexpected and shocking. You have to have lived long enough, you have to have looked inside yourself long enough, to come up with a film like this. And also to survive it.