'Sirat' by Oliver Laxe: cinema as an overwhelming sensory experience of traffic

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the protagonist of Desert Centaurs, forged the mold for an entire anti-hero archetype: that of the man who enters Comanche territory to save an innocent woman and ends up confronting the darkest part of his masculinity. John Ford's character resonates with Luis, the protagonist of Sirado, a father willing to go deep into the Moroccan desert to find his daughter, lost somewhere radish. The character played by Sergi López displays the same obsessive nature but with a more open mentality than Wayne, and it doesn't take long for him to follow a troupe who works as radish in radish. But the fourth feature film by the Galician Oliver Laxe It does connect with Ford's film when it comes to turning around the link of conquest between man and foreign territory. western classic.

Sirado It unfolds as a journey through a natural setting that is a challenge for the protagonists. The film integrates this vocation of postwestern with the elements of thriller of road ofThe wages of fear (1953) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the revision of the idea of family of Freaks and the image of a Mad Max minimal. Previous Laxe titles such as Mimosas and What burns They already redefined the position of human beings in the natural world, capturing the landscape from a profoundly overwhelming perspective. They seek to imbue the plot with philosophical content (acceptance of the randomness of fate, blind faith, etc.), but are questionable for how they trivialize cruelty.