Summary
A beautifully shot film driven by the fusion of music and visuals, albeit one that engenders a sense of disconnection and looks for meaning a little too earnestly before losing focus.
Humanity’s fascination with looking at, climbing, and trying to conquer mountains is the subject of Jennifer Peedom’s follow-up to Sherpa. Joining forces with Australian Chamber Orchestra, MOUNTAIN is an attempt to understand that ongoing appeal, decades after Earth’s mountains have seemingly all been charted.
Narrated by Willem Dafoe, Peedom’s brief documentary takes viewers on a global journey of not just the mountains themselves, but of the various activities people have undertaken to diminish their power somehow. Through this we get a potted history of mountaineering, geology, and the extremes to which people go to claim that they were the ‘first’ to do something new.
MOUNTAIN is unquestionably filled with achingly beautiful landscape shots from cinematographer Renan Ozturk, who also worked with Peedom on Sherpa. With locations as diverse as Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Iceland, India, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Tibet, and the USA, the visuals certainly challenge the notion that mountains are a homogeneous entity.
Yet Peedom doesn’t let these images speak for themselves. Layered with added meaning, and a script based on the words of Robert Macfarlane’s book Mountains of the Mind, it never pauses to let us come to any grand conclusions on our own. “The unknown will answer back with whatever you call into it,” Dafoe’s narration tells us, which is also the modus operandi for Peedom’s approach to the film. So for a film that largely focuses on aesthetic beauty, those answers are inevitably as shallow.
The familiar music choices do not help this surface level approach either. When Richard Tognetti is not providing original pieces to suit the mood, the soundtrack whips out enough recognisable Chopin, Grieg, Vivaldi, and Beethoven to fill a feature’s worth of home appliance or prestige car commercials.
Peedom’s examination would have perhaps worked better in a shorter form as part of a serial. This becomes particularly evident as the film loses focuses in its final act, becoming more of an extreme sports showcase that an exploration of the filmmaker’s original thesis. “To those who are enthralled by mountains, their wonder is beyond all dispute,” argues the narration. “To those who are not, their allure is a kind of madness.”
Which might be where a certain percentage of the audience are still left by the end of this, happily miles away in a well-furnished cabin enjoying a schooner of imperial stout. Peedom’s quest to win us over the throngs of the enthralled is admirable, but this may not be the film to do it.
