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Saints and sinners of extreme sports

By Dave Kehr
NY TIMES SERVICE, NEW YORK
Friday, Sep 01, 2006, Page 16

Death and gut-wrenching decisions are just a misstep away on the mountain. PHOTO COURTESY OF CINEPLEX

Mountain climbing has long provided a seductive metaphor for spiritual quests, ever since Moses went up Mount Sinai and came down with the Ten Commandments.

We may no longer expect explicit spiritual guidance in our mountain movies, but a film like Kevin Macdonald’s disappointing Touching the Void, a British semi-documentary, is still very much concerned with notions of purification and transcendence, of slipping the bonds of ordinary material existence and entering a new, elevated realm of stark simplicity, elemental forces and moral clarity.

The mountain movies that were popular in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many starring Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker, pointed a clear way out of the messy conflicts and confusions of the Weimar era. Unfortunately, however, they pointed to Hitler, who quickly appropriated the mountain imagery for his own propaganda ends.

In keeping with our current ideologies, the climb in Touching the Void is treated less like a religious retreat than a psychological encounter session, a high-altitude group-therapy meeting that allows its two real-life protagonists, the British climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, to learn important lessons about themselves and their inter-personal relationships.

Film notes: Touching the Void Directed by Kevin Macdonald Starring: Joe Simpson and Simon Yates (themselves) and Brendan Mackey (Joe Simpson), Nicholas Aaron (Simon Yates). Running time: 102 minutes Taiwan release: Today

With the use of staged, pseudo-documentary sequences, the film reconstructs the disastrous 1985 attempt that Simpson and Yates made on the 6,400m Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. All went well for three days until Simpson fell and drove his lower leg into his kneecap, leaving him crippled. Yates tried to lower Simpson down the mountainside with a climbing rope, but accidentally lowered him into a deep crevasse. Receiving no response from his partner, Yates was faced with a terrible choice: either to stay and hold on to the rope, at the risk of being eventually pulled into the ravine by Simpson’s body weight, or to cut the rope and try to save himself.

While the actors Brendan Mackey (as Simpson) and Nicholas Aaron (as Yates) recreate the climb on camera (with the help of climbing doubles), clambering through locations that range from the actual Peruvian mountain to Mount Blanc in the Alps, the genuine Simpson and Yates narrate their adventures from an unidentified cozy, warm place just off screen. Because we already know the two men will survive, suspense is at a minimum; the film is more concerned with the awful suffering they endured, tortures both mental (as Yates struggles with the decision to cut the cord) and physical (as Simpson finds himself in the pit of an ice cave, barely able to crawl and with no obvious way out).

This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material. MacDonald, the director, imitates a raw, video-based cinema verite style, but fairly often places the camera in locations that would be inaccessible to a cameraman on the actual expedition (for example, when Simpson falls into the crevasse, the camera crew is already there to meet him).

Just as Simpson falls into the physical hell of the mountain’s cavernous innards, so does Yates confront the moral hell of being forced — or so he believes — to sacrifice his partner in order to save himself. The lesson of Touching the Void is that both experiences not only can be survived, but also can be an occasion for what the daytime talk shows call ‘’personal growth.’’ Having come through, having touched the void and been touched by it, Simpson and Yates are shown as elevated spirits, with a new sense of what is important in their lives and what is not. It is apparently not only the church that now produces saints but also extreme sports as well.
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