Cannes 2025: Desert odyssey Sirat and postpartum drama Die, My Love paint seemingly heavier emotions

Indian Express

19-05-2025

Grief hits in different ways. Some shut down, refusing to deal with it. Some drown in it. Learning to live with it is part of being an adult, but it can be a hard ride.
Oliver Laxe's competition entry Sirat uses a staggering tragedy to hang its grief-struck characters on: it is an unimaginably cruel trick that is played on an unsuspecting Luis (Sergi Lopez), who, along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Nunez), has set out to look for his missing daughter. She's been gone for months, but following a slim indication that she may have fetched up at a rave in the Moroccan desert, Luis and Esteban team up with a group on the run from a militia.
The setting feels futuristic, with an impending big war.
The rebel group — Jade, Steffi, Josh, Tonin and Bigui – has been together for a time, at ease with each other's oddities and disabilities. These characters, all played by non-actors, become the support the father and son are looking for as they push deep into the Sahara, creating a convoy of hope till despair engulfs them.
Laxe's stunning film could be neatly divided into two parts. The search and the aftermath of the tragedy, where the group is left stranded in the middle of a minefield, surrounded by lethal live bombs. Will they make it to the other side?
The rave party dances like no one's looking, like there's no tomorrow, like this is the moment where they can be fully alive. Death does come, but the travellers continue, because there is no other choice: Sirat, the Arabic word for path, is magnificently literal and allegorical at the same time, — it doesn't allow death to come as an end.
Life goes on, however fragmented and painful it may be.
Die, My Love
Very few filmmakers dig as deep into the ties that bind us in happiness and in sorrow as Lynne Ramsay does.
Die, My Love in Cannes competition, stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a married couple. Grace and Jackson have just moved to an isolated country house and they are shown revelling in the sheer space, in and out of the house.
'Hey, look, here's an office,' we hear Jackson's voice, 'maybe you can write your great American novel here.' That is the plan. But mice and men stop Grace in her tracks — the room is full of mice, and the man in her life, while appearing to be completely in sync, is almost always at odds. He turns up with a dog when it is a rat-catching cat that they need most. The baby that they have, after an intensely passionate interlude, becomes the thing that gets in between them.
Having a baby and desire are not mutually exclusive. As a woman in the depths of postpartum depression trying to deal with sexual deprivation while being as good a mother as she can be, Lawrence is outstanding.
Pattinson offers well-judged support: in his callow ways, the pressures of parenting overwhelm him too. Sissy Spacek, playing Jackson's mother, is surprisingly sympathetic, understanding the weight of Grace's turmoil. Motherhood is not always what it is cracked up to be, and only Ramsay can say it in this unflinching, clear-eyed fashion.