by Julian Wood
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sergi Lopez, Bruno Nunez Arjona, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Herderson
Intro:
… tense, dark, even abject but also mysterious, thought-provoking and occasionally tender.
This strange, confronting film set in Southern Morrocco won the Jury Prize at Cannes. This is not a film that one could recommend to all without some caveats. Family entertainment it ain’t.
The milieux in a sense is rave music. Of course, rave music isn’t just a music. It is a culture and, for some, an ethic and a way of life. The film contains long sequences of raves in the desert. We have watched a good ten minutes of this before we even get to the title.
Watching people at a rave can be an alienating experience, perhaps especially if you have never done it. (It only really works, lets be honest with some, er, chemical enrichment), otherwise it is just repetitive music. For devotees, the hypnotic rhythm, the vibe and the loved-up communality of it all is like no other experience. It is a chance to forget not just your cares, but what divides you from others. It is also, by its nature, a very non-judgmental place. It doesn’t matter if you can’t dance, or if you’re physically unattractive or ‘imperfect’ or if you’re of indeterminate gender and so on. This world view is what binds the band of gypsies in Oliver Laxe’s film together. For them, doof-doof in the desert is their chosen sacrament.
Over the course of the film, we spend time with five or six individuals as they hit the trail in search of another rave. To get there means not only dodging the unnamed armies that are waging some end-of-the-world conflict around them, but the increasingly hostile sub-Saharan conditions complete with vicious sandstorms that erase all tracks. The thread of the film is the quest of one man Luis (French actor Sergi Lopez). His eldest daughter Mar has disappeared into the rave world and, together with his young teen son Estaban (Bruno Nunez Arjona), Luis goes from party to party trying to find her. He forms an unlikely bond with the tattooed punky ravers that agree to help him.
To call the film bleak would be to sum it up too neatly and to label it too glibly. It is a remarkable effort in some ways. It manages lots of registers; it is tense, dark, even abject but also mysterious, thought-provoking and occasionally tender. In one way, it pushes away our humanist sympathies. We know these characters well enough to see them as highly individual, but not well enough internally to really buy in. However, this may be irrelevant to what Laxe is trying to do. This is a post-humanist text (if you will forgive the jargon), in which man is both puny and doomed. The end of the world is nigh. We have turned the climate against us, and we have lost sight of a workable order or the common good. There is nothing left to do but dance. And even that may not save us.
