NORTH FACE
Directed by Philipp Stölzl
Produced by Boris Schoenfelder, Danny Krausz, Rudolf Santschi & Benjamin Herrmann
Written by Christoph Silber, Rupert Henning, Mr. Stölzl & Johannes Naber, based on a script by Benedikt Roeskau
Released by Music Box Films
German with English subtitles
Germany. 121 min. Not Rated
With Benno Fürmann, Johanna Wokalek, Florian Lukas, Simon Schwarz, Georg Friedrich & Ulrich Tukur
 

North Face has two villains. First, there’s the north face of the Eiger, a 5,900-foot high wall of stone and ice casting a near-permanent shadow over the Swiss town beneath it. And then there’s the creeping power of the Nazi party, casting a specter of a decidedly different kind.           

Caught between the two are Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas), two rural Germans eager to prove themselves as the greatest Alpinists of their generation. The year is 1936, and the Nazi party, always game for a good metaphor, has decided it wants a team to scale the sheer cliff, the so-called “last great problem of the Alps.” Toni and Andreas get swept up as one of many teams in the drive for the summit, along with Luise (Johanna Wokalek), a childhood flame of Toni’s now covering the race for a Berlin paper.

Early in this fact-based film, Toni appraises the climb as “a lottery, even for the best climbers in the world.” It doesn’t stop him from taking to the cliffs, but it gives the whole affair a touch of the existential. Toni’s struggle is more personal than the other climbers, but there’s nothing to protect him from being used by the media circus surrounding the competition, and, more importantly, no guarantee that this is a battle he can win.

The mountain sequences live up to expectations, thanks to the vertigo-inducing cinematography (whoever was manning the camera must be fearless), but the real thrills come from the increasing demands of the climb, which scale beyond anything Toni and Andreas anticipated as the weather turns sour and their equipment starts failing. It becomes a very different kind of movie in the final third, a slow burn that’s less about ambition than loss, but the late turn suits the movie’s themes perfectly.      

One of the most pleasant of the film’s surprises is the class divisions that pop up at every turn. While the climbers eat barley soup in their tent, the ruling class eats steak and, in a particularly nasty touch, an Eiger-shaped chocolate cake, complete with fruits pinned to the sides to represent the climbers. They’ll sing the praises of the men on the mountain, but only for as long as it’s in style. The only lasting respect the heroes can hope for comes from the mountain itself. Russell Brandom
January 29, 2010