philipbrasor.com

The appeal of mountain climbing, even to those who have absolutely no interest in partaking themselves, is special. The old colloquy of why one would want to scale a peak and then the intended interlocutor coming back with “because it’s there” both accentuates and disregards the mystery behind the climber’s obsession. In recent years there has been a sudden surfeit of climbing movies, both fiction features and documentaries, and the reason they’ve become so ubiquitous is twofold: climbers themselves have become skilled at the art of filmmaking; and drones. This combination definitely comes into its own with The Alpinist. The directors, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, are both seasoned alpinists and they take as their subject a figure that, until the pair decided to make a movie about him, would have likely remained just another legend within a cognoscenti delineated by a fixation on a rare and infamously dangerous sport. Canadian Marc-Andre Leclerc was considered the best of the best, and not just because his rock and ice climbing skills were next to superhuman. Like all great artists he shunned anything that fell outside his specific art. When he climbed, he climbed solo and didn’t tell anyone about it, so his greatest feats were known only to him. Nevertheless, he did have friends, invariably part of the climbing community, and word got out. Mortimer and Rosen finally approached him about making a movie when he was barely into his 20s and he agreed as long as they didn’t get in his way. The Alpinist is suitably, fascinatingly wonky, because the directors are pleasing themselves first, but this attention to detail is what makes The Alpinist superior to the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, which was also directed by a pair of climbers, and is intrinsically linked to Leclerc’s m.o. of being tight-lipped and unflappable, whereas the subject of Free Solo, climber Alex Honnold, was more of a raconteur-philosopher, and thus a less naturally charismatic focus for a movie about an athlete, which should be about the doing, not the explaining.

What Mortimer (who also narrates) and Rosen provide in addition to the thrills and awe-inspiring visuals expected of mountaineering movies is a portrait of a loner that transcends the usual cliches about loners. Leclerc, who reportedly had ADHD, left high school at a young age simply to pursue mountain climbing and fell into the drug and alcohol scene that tends to materialize around people who live on the edge. The directors never let you forget that half of leading solo climbers die while pursuing their dream, but that Leclerc’s almost bizarre sense of self-containment while climbing (“filming him was terrifying, but he always seemed so relaxed”) was what made the production so irresistible. It also makes for drama that’s almost inexplicable. Leclerc was the son of working class parents who spent most of his youth just walking through the forests of British Columbia. That he eventually fell in love and spent time with a permanent girlfriend, also a climber, is seen as something of an anomaly since he wasn’t just a loner by temperament. He was preternaturally unconnected. The purpose of The Alpinist is to film him doing something he didn’t care about anyone else knowing—a climb up an impossible rock or ice face that Honnold would have likely trumpeted to the media because he needed the exposure for fund-raising. One of the uninvestigated mysteries of The Alpinist was how Leclerc supported himself. He was, in essence, a bum who lived day-to-day in order to climb. In one of the most poignant scenes, after a successful, treacherous climb in South America, he has to negotiate with a cab driver—in fluent Spanish—to get him to the airport because he’s broke. 

Patrick Imbert’s The Summit of the Gods is a more conventional mountain climbing movie since it’s based on a work of fiction written almost 30 years ago, the award-winning manga by Jiro Taniguchi and Baku Yumemakura. Imbert, a French animator, adapted the manga as a French-language ode to classic anime, but local distributors have wisely redubbed it with Japanese dialogue, since all the characters are Japanese. The basic plot is a detective story. After covering an unsuccessful climb of Mt. Everest by a Japanese mountaineering club in the 1980s, photographer Makoto Fukamachi is approached by a local in a Katmandu bar offering to sell him the small camera that was supposedly lost by British climber George Mallory in 1924. Mallory didn’t make it back and his body not found until 1999, well before the action of Summit, so it was never clear if he actually made it to the peak. Fukamachi brushes off the local and then, outside the bar in an alley, he sees the local being shaken down by a man with a missing finger. Later, he suspects that the man was Joji Habu, who, like Leclerc, was a legend within local mountaineering circles for his daring solo climbs, but after he takes on an apprentice who dies during an ascent, Habu disappeared. 

Unfortunately, the movie never really gets back on track with the Mallory mystery and wastes a lot of narrative time speculating about what happened to the British climber. Mostly, it follows Fukamachi’s pursuit of Habu, who in the meantime has been laying low in Nepal attempting his own solo ascent of the world’s highest mountain and, again like Leclerc, is not interested in anybody knowing about it. Fame isn’t in it. It’s all about the doing, and in that regard the platitudes come fast and thick and bog down the story, but Imbert’s animation is as stunning as the footage that Mortimer and Rosen achieved in The Alpinist, and because he can more readily manipulate these images, Imbert works them for maximum dramatic effect. Though I’m not a big fan of anime, what Imbert accomplishes here is stunning. To lay persons like me, the idea of climbing a mountain under the conditions depicted in The Alpinist and The Summit of the Gods is akin to fantasy of the most extraordinary type, and Imbert captures that quality perfectly.

The Alpinist is now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Alpinist home page in Japanese

The Alpinist photo (c) 2021 Red Bull Media House

The Summit of the Gods in Japanese now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Summit of the Gods home page in Japanese

The Summit of the Gods photo (c) Le Some des Dieux – 2021/Julianne Films/Folivari/Melusine Productions/France 3 Cinema/Aura Cinema

The idea of blending porn and slasher pic has surely been thought of before, but as far as I know it hadn’t been realized as a feature film, and director Ti West deserves credit for thinking through the concept with more care than others might have. First of all, he sets it in the late 70s, when porn had finally reached commercial viability and slasher films were coming into their own in a big way. He’s also quite technical about the making of the film within the film, a quickie stroker called The Farmer’s Daughter, showing how these things are actually put together, and grounds the various characters motivations in behavior that feels of and about its time. The producer, Wayne (Martin Henderson), knows his small crew well, but West makes sure his sexism shows through, even if he thinks he’s not a sexist. His girlfriend and business partner, Maxine (Mia Goth), seems to have more together as a filmmaker than he does, but, of course, she’s relegated to lesser billing both in the credits and on the set. The cameraman, RJ (Own Campbell), pretends toward being an artist, while his girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who is also the sound engineer, is the only person on hand who seems to have a clear head about things in general, and at one point she asks to appear in the film performing sex, mainly to bug RJ, who clearly isn’t into it. 

The setting is the key. Wayne finds an old boarding house attached to a farm on a backroad in Texas where he plans to make the movie. The couple who own the farm are old and know nothing about the purpose of the crew’s visit, and while they’re a strange pair they don’t seem that interested in finding out at first. But when the wife, Pearl (also Goth, heavily made up), who is clearly not well, stumbles on the set and sees the actors getting it on something is triggered in her—at one point she starts moaning about how her husband can’t get it up—and she starts stalking the crew members with various farm implements. There’s also an alligator involved.

All the action takes place during one long night, but once the killings start the film loses whatever distinction it had initially offered through the porn connection. The suspense is rote and the bloodletting conventional. Even the subtext that sex can provoke murderous impulses—something that undergirds probably 90 percent of the slasher genre—seems pretty weak here, which seems like a missed opportunity. Maybe West should have just made a regular movie about creating quickie porn in the late 70s. It certainly would have been more interesting that what he ended up with. 

Opens July 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

X home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Over the Hill Pictures LLC

These days it seems almost counter-intuitive when a male storyteller presumes to make something that takes the purview of a female protagonist. Of course, it wasn’t always that way and shouldn’t be. Some great male artists have given us vivid, credible female characters whose stories were enlightening and edifying. Scandinavians, Bergman and Ibsen immediately come to mind, seem to be better at this sort of thing, so Joachim Trier, a Danish-Norwegian director whose films have covered a wide range of genres and themes, seems at least constitutionally prepared to take on the tale of a young woman who attempts to interrupt her aimless drift in life by anchoring herself to a male partner. The pitfalls are obvious in such a narrative undertaking, and Trier, to his credit, understands this.

In a glib opening montage narrated by a third person, we learn how Julie (Renate Reinsve) has, in the course of her post-secondary school education, moved from pre-med to psychology to photography without really getting much of a handle on any of them, and ends up working in a book shop, which presumably keeps her stimulated intellectually but is really just a port of call while she figures out what she wants. When she hooks up at a party with the older (by about 15 years) Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a former underground comics star famous for his anthropomorphic animal characters’ sexism and crudeness, she endeavors to move in with him, though it seems like yet another way of testing her tolerance of convention. During a weekend spent with Aksel at his parents’ house with friends, all of whom are married with kids, the subject of a long-term relationship comes up amidst the usual connubial dustups, and Julie expresses her disinclination to being a mother, a view informed by her uneasy ties with her divorced parents and which Aksel deems premature, since, as a man with “less time” than her he thinks he has to start a family before it’s too late. This conversation, carefully structured for its evocation of each character’s position, sets the tone for the film in a way that Trier may not have anticipated. From now on, the viewer will evaluate Julie’s choices from her standpoint on the possibility of becoming a mother, and while that is a concern many if not most women have to address, it feels limiting given Julie’s ongoing quest for self-awareness. When she publishes online a provocative essay about sexuality, she’s applauded, especially by Aksel and other male peers, for her frankness and stylistic skills, and you can sense some slight resentment on her part at their patronizing tone.

Inevitably, given her restless temperament, Julie drifts out of her relationship with Aksel, who, by dint of being older seemed resigned to living his life with her, children or no children. She takes up with Eivid (Herbert Nordrum), a barista her own age who is also unmoored—he doesn’t want children either—and coming out of a long-term relationship, but unlike Julie he feels extremely guilty about leaving his former mate. In fact, it is in another glib third-person narrated montage about this process where the titular phrase is evoked (“cheating on her felt like cheating on the planet”). But even if Eivid is very different from Aksel, the quality of Julie’s dissatisfaction with the state of her existence remains unchanged. 

Many have called The Worst Person in the World a romantic comedy, which both shortchanges its peculiar comic charms and underestimates its dramatic thrust. Trier is especially fond of narrative non sequiturs, but the sequences where Julie stops time to rendezvous with Eivid or trips on mushrooms add little cinematic color to the story. And the somewhat maudlin, typical ending indicates that certain ideas about women’s options haven’t changed much since Paul Mazursky allowed Jill Clayburgh to choose bohemian uncertainty over middle class security in An Unmarried Woman. This isn’t to say that Julie’s story should have been told by a woman. She is Trier’s creation and can only be accepted on his terms. 

In Norwegian. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03- 3352-5645)

The Worst Person in the World home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Oslo Pictures-MK Productions-Film I Vast-Snowglobe-B-Reel-Arte France Cinema