Touching the Void – Kevin Macdonald

I was lucky enough to see this film and participate in a question and answer session with the director yesterday evening. It is the most gripping piece of cinema I’ve seen for some time, despite being a well-known story whose outcome is apparent from the first frames: you know Joe will make it as his interviews interpolate the story.

The film is a reconstruction of the events rather than a ‘film of the book’ but the story is virtually identical for those who have read the original version. It’s a mix of documentary and re-created account. The climbing scenes are completely convincing and the scenery and photography stunning. The story could easily have become a Reader’s Digest style triumph against adversity but is saved by the brutal honesty of the interviews with Simon and Joe and the ambition of the film-making. It also has some extremely funny, if black, moments including the best ever use of a Boney M song in a film!

The plot is simple but almost mythical in power: Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, ambitious young climbers, tackle hard new route in the Andes. They reach the summit but Joe has an accident, badly breaking a leg, as they start the decent. Simon conducts a heroic rescue attempt, lowering Joe thousands of feet in stages almost to the foot of the mountain. In the dark and blizzard, Joe is lowered past an overhang and can’t regain the rock. Simon is slowly pulled from his seat in the snow by Joe’s weight and takes the awesome decision to cut the rope and apparently sacrifice his friend rather than let both of them be pulled to their death. Hypothermic and in shock, the following day Simon sees the crevasse that Joe has fallen into, hundreds of feet deep, abandons him for dead and returns to camp. Joe, incredibly, survives the 150’ fall by landing on a snow-bridge in the crevasse and in a four-day marathon manages to extricate himself from the crevasse and crawl down the glacier back to camp. Ultimately, it’s about man’s insignificance in a dispassionate universe.

The film dwells on Joe’s experiences, but judging by the look of the two as they retell their tale, it’s Simon who is still haunted by the experience twenty years later. The question becomes not ‘why did he cut the rope’, that’s clearly evident, but rather why didn’t he take more time to search for Joe or the remains of Joe. If I have one criticism of the film it’s that it does not really portray the state Simon would have been in, physically and emotionally, the day after he abandoned Joe. It could also have been made clearer, to non-climbers, that it would have been Russian roulette for Simon to have gone back up the glacier on his own to do a search. I knew Simon Yates, one of the protagonists, from University climbing days, so this aspect of review is probably a touch biased. But I’d be hypercritical to inaccuracies and insensitivities had the story not been so well done. Strongly recommended.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1089359,00.html

duncan

Email: djcritchley at hotmail.com

I haven't seen the film, but I read the book many years ago after being told about it by my ex-brother-in-law who also knew Joe from his University days in Sheffield. Highly recommended.

"Be my lover, don't cause me pain, just play me John Coltrane"

I'll be watching this film with interest as one of my friends worked on the mountain safety on it.