Besides the music, the main appeal of raving is the feeling: of heads jolting to the sound of the beat, and sticky bodies rubbing up against one another as night turns into day. Lost in the groove, dancers escape from modern life'and decades after raving's emergence in the 1980s, people are still looking for existential meaning at the club. On the outskirts of cities, or under concrete bridges, they slip into their finest nylon-spandex blends, metallic-paper-clip chains, and plastic sunglasses. Whatever ennui the dancers feel, they might, at least, break through it in communion with other disaffected selves. The possibilities and limitations of raving as an escape are the concern of Sirat, a film by the French Spanish director Oliver Laxe, which imagines paradise as an illegal rave guarded by towering speakers in the middle of the Moroccan desert. Nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound at the upcoming Academy Awards, Laxe's movie follows Luis, a middle-aged...
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