<\/p>\n
The smile is beatific, blissed out, even at an ungodly hour on our Zoom call from France. A week later, when I finally meet 43-year old filmmaker Oliver Laxe in person at a private Toronto celebration for his new movie \u201cSir\u00e2t,\u201d he radiates serenity. He\u2019s the happiest (and maybe the tallest) person in the room.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the first ideas that I had for this film was a sentence from Nietzsche,\u201d he says. “I won\u2019t believe in a God who doesn’t dance.”<\/p>\n
Laxe goes to raves \u2014 \u201cfree parties,\u201d he clarifies, indicating the ones you need to hear about via word of mouth. He\u2019s thought deeply about what they mean and what they do to him. \u201cWe still have a memory in our bodies of these ceremonies that we were doing for thousands of years, when we were making a kind of catharsis with our bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s almost the opposite of what you expect to hear on the fall festival circuit, when directors with big ideas make their cases for the significance of the art form. But the body, the return to something purely sensorial, is Laxe\u2019s big idea.<\/p>\n
Steadily, \u201cSir\u00e2t\u201d has become, since its debut at Cannes in May<\/a>, a growing favorite: not merely a critic\u2019s darling but an obsession among those who\u2019ve seen it. A dance party in the desert set at some vaguely hinted-at moment of apocalypse, the movie is something you feel, not solve. Its pounding EDM beats rattle pleasurably in your chest (provided the theater\u2019s speakers are up to snuff). And the explosions on the horizon shake your heartbeat.<\/p>\n \u201cI really trust in the capacity of images to penetrate into the metabolism of the spectator,\u201d Laxe says. \u201cI’m like a masseuse. When you watch my films, sometimes you\u2019ll want to kill me or you\u2019ll feel the pain in your body, like: Wow, what a treat. But after, you can feel the result.\u201d<\/p>\n Laxe can speak about his influences: cosmic epics by the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky or existential road movies like \u201cZabriskie Point\u201d and \u201cTwo-Lane Blacktop.\u201d<\/a> But he is not a product of a typical grad-school trajectory. Rather, it\u2019s his escape from that path after growing up in northern Spanish Galicia and studying in Barcelona (he tried London for a while) that\u2019s fascinating.<\/p>\n \u201cI was not good,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI didn’t find I had a place in the industry or in Europe. I was not interested. I had bought a camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, and I knew I was accepting that my role was to be a kind of sniper that was working in the trenches but making really small films.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> Toronto: They couldn’t stop talking, even before the cameras for ‘Poetic License’ were rolling<\/a><\/p>\n At age 24, Laxe moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he would live for 12 years at a monastic remove from the glamour of the movies, collaborating with local children on his films. The experience would grow into his first feature, 2010\u2019s \u201cYou Are All Captains,\u201d which eventually took him all the way to the prize-winning podium at Cannes, as did his second and third films, all of which came before \u201cSir\u00e2t,\u201d his fourth.<\/p>\n \u201cSlowly, the things we were making were opening doors,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a way, life was deciding, telling me: This is your path.\u201d<\/p>\n Path is what \u201cSir\u00e2t\u201d means in Arabic, often with a religious connotation, and his new movie takes a unique journey, traversing from the loose-limbed dancing of its early scenes to a train\u2019s tracks stretching fixedly to the end of the line. There\u2019s also a quest that gets us into the film: a father and son searching among the ravers for a missing daughter, potentially a nod to \u201cThe Searchers\u201d<\/a> or Paul Schrader’s \u201cHardcore,\u201d but not a plot point that Laxe feels especially interested in expounding on.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously I have a spiritual path and this path is about celebrating crisis,\u201d he says. \u201cMy path was through crisis. It’s the only time when you connect with your essence. I just want to grow. So that’s why I jump into the abyss.\u201d<\/p>\n