The Mountain, written and directed by Thomas Salvador, who also stars, is an uneven effort. It starts as an austere adventure tale replete with dramatic, how-did-they-get-that-shot cinematography, an essentially silent film about a man pulled into alpine exploration by the immense and beautiful profile of Mont Blanc. The film later morphs into an abstract and surrealist story, still with very little dialogue, that ultimately unspools a messianic fable.
At the center of the story is Salvador’s character, Pierre, a Parisian robotics engineer who ventures to the base of Mont Blanc for a work presentation. With the weekend looming after his pitch, he decides to stay in the Alps for the weekend, tugged by the mountain’s ineffable magnetism to explore the snowy sides of the most famous peak in France. Pierre has a pleasant couple of days, and when it’s time to return to his rigid urban routine, he instead fakes an illness and returns to the peak.
Pierre writes to his elderly mother explaining that he is at peace on the mountain and intends to stay for quite some time. Even after losing his job, berated as an irresponsible moron by his irate brother and having to hire a worker from the gondola station to carry him groceries up from the village, Pierre remains resolute. Eventually, he begins seeing glowing lights deeper in the Alps and investigates them. It seems only he can see them, and he is drawn to them with a recklessness that surpasses even his attachment to his tent site upon Mont Blanc. Risking life and limb (quite literally), Pierre ventures deeper into the Alps.
At its center, The Mountain is a fairly heavy-handed metaphor about climate change. In the first scenes of Pierre exploring Mont Blanc, he walks past the many signs showing where the glacier used to be, prior to its melting ever smaller. This theme is alluded to again and again in the scant dialogue—there is too little moisture, the mountain is too hot—and is the basis for Pierre’s surrender of his day job and old life back in Paris. Rather than making robots that will help some corporation manufacture something—all of which will surely only further heat the world—he will walk around above the timber line and source his water from the mountain’s primordial snow. For him, his new life is pure and simple. Climate change, too, is the source/inspiration of the strange glowing phenomenon that Pierre observes in the mountains. As the film ends, it suggests that Pierre is off to fight climate change by showing that the mountain has performed a miracle for him.
Overlooking that Salvador wrote and directed a film that casts himself as a messianic figure, The Mountain has several other shortcomings. The story is too obvious, the surrealist elements are poorly conceived and executed and Pierre just seems a strange vessel for the mountains to have selected for their message to humanity: he lacks charisma, is not a lifer in the mountains and, from the conversation with his mother and brothers, he does not have much going for him personally and socially. If the mountains are going to perform a miracle to create a spokesperson to save the environment from climate change, they could do much better than a reclusive tourist who does not say much or express emotion in any way.
Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
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