The gap between the popular image of climbing Mount Everest and the stark realities of climbing it is breathtaking when you look at the details. It’s easy to romanticize the trip as a statement about challenging human boundaries and conquering nature. Step one: hike the highest mountain in the world “because it is there.” Step two: Stand triumphantly on the summit and look down on the whole world. Step three: enjoy the feeling of intransigence.
But there’s nothing romantic about that actual process, which usually involves paying huge sums of money and wading through tons of red tape to spend money an average of two months on a strenuous ascent with little chance of success. The summit is usually only accessible for a few weeks or even days of the year due to the weather, and many expeditions have to be canceled before this final ascent. It is today too Climbers die surprisingly often on Everest
The luscious, cool French animated film The summit of the gods, based on Jirô Taniguchi’s 1998 manga adaptation of Baku Yumemakura’s novel, does not seek to sell the romantic view of Everest or portray the dream of reaching the top as heroic or glamorous. Director Patrick Imbert focuses on the details of the journey and the grim drive that would lead people to risk their lives, not for a quick and adrenaline-fueled thrill, but for a protracted, isolating, and exhausting saga. Imbert’s film, Stream on Netflix nowHe admits that it is a kind of nobility to single-mindedly pursue something regardless of the cost. But he portrays this pursuit in a somber, thoughtful way, without glossing over how much it resembles madness.
The structure of the story told – similar to Citizen Kane, it shows a journalist trying to reconstruct a man’s life by speaking to his former friends, colleagues and partners and reconstructing the threads of his story in order to better understand him. But the journalist Fukamachi Makoto (Damien Boisseau) does not try to portray a dead person, but rather to track down a living one. Fukamachi works as a magazine photographer and directs Everest to take photos of an ongoing Japanese expedition. If they prepare poorly and fall behind schedule, they are forced to turn back prematurely, leaving him without the photos he needs for his assignment.
When he returns to Kathmandu to complain to his editor, Fukamachi briefly sees a man he believes to be Habu Joji (Eric Herson-Macarel), a once famous climber who disappeared years ago. And he’s holding a camera that Fukamachi believes may have belonged to George Mallory, an explorer who disappeared on Everest in 1924. The secret of whether Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine reached the summit of Everest 29 years before the first recorded summit is still present in the climbing world, and Fukamachi is hoping the camera holds the answers. (The body of the Real life Mallory was found in 1999, but his camera was never excavated.)
When Fukamachi fails to track down Habu, he follows in the man’s footsteps, from childhood to his days as a spiky runaway in a Japanese climbing club to his solo career, trying to make a name for himself in the process and deserve the applause and the Sponsorships that allow him to survive greater trials. It is clear that Habu was driven by both a strong obsession with pushing the boundaries of what is possible for climbers and an equally strong determination to go his own way for reasons shaped by experience who have favourited Fukamachi gradually discovered.
There’s a strong melancholy too The summit of the gods, somewhat akin to the melancholy and feeling of alienation in the otherwise dissimilar (and also on Netflix) French animated film I lost my body. Only one of these films has a severed hand struggling through Paris to tackle urban wildlife, but both are about people who have separated emotionally from their fellow human beings and found a reason to persistently chase after a difficult task. And both draw from this French feeling of boredom, a tiredness of the soul that arises when one finds most of the everyday and uninteresting things. I lost my body‘s protagonist finds his escape in the hunt for a girl, while Habu finds his in the hunt for increasingly difficult climbs and the associated dream of fame.
But Fukamachi finds his by chasing Habu. He’s just as obsessed as Habu and just as prone to leaving other people behind while he persistently pursues his fixation. It is clear that both men are remarkably similar, even if their goals are different. Both clearly see the barriers in front of them and find it impossible to turn away from the hunt and lead a normal life, no matter how unsatisfactory each new achievement becomes.
The film’s methodical pace and calm, inner atmosphere require a bit of patience, but the climbing sections are dizzying and emotional, with high stakes and realistic action. Imbert ensures that the audience feels every misstep, every crumbling hold and loose hook, every trembling and overwhelmed muscle or fraying rope. When climbers face Everest, viewers who have seen photos of the ice walls and base camps will be amazed at how specific this film is and how hard Imbert works for you-are-there-truth. He doesn’t seem out to demythologize Everest, but he never makes it look simple or stylized either. For most of us, this intimate, hands-on look at the mechanics of mountaineering is the closest point we are likely to approach the highest point on earth.
This feeling of being part of the climbers’ journey is the main attraction of The summit of the godsthat measures and keeps his other joys to a minimum. The character animation is kept simple, the backgrounds often shoot for a simplified, only slightly stylized photo-realism. There’s nothing of the energy or visual play that animation makes this good. It’s not entirely rotoscopic, but it gives a sense of weighty reality that most animated films lack.
But where the film lacks speed or feel, it instead engenders a form of awe, both given the scale of Habu’s efforts and the clear danger he defies in his quest to reach the top of his field and the top the world. It has its share of victories, but all come with costs and losses. The feeling that there will always be another mountain ahead of you overlays the story with a strong sense of inevitability. The summit of the gods is not a happy film and not a dreamy one. But it feels like a remarkably insightful meditation, both on what it really would be like to fight your way up Mount Everest and on why people keep taking up the challenge.
The summit of the gods is in limited theaters and is now streamed on Netflix.