Shot on Location, North Face Is Slow, Realistic, and Excruciating

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North Face

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No, not the parkas. The fearsome north face of the Eiger mountain became the object of national socialist obsession during the '30s. An Olympic gold medal was promised to its first summit party — preferably to be of good, blond Aryan stock, and the Nazi press glorified those alpinists who tried. Though, as a newspaper editor says in this dramatization of an epic, real-life attempt, "Those two don't care about the politics," referring to the rustic Bavarian mountaineers who quit the Wehrmacht to make the attempt — after bicycling 700 kilometers to Switzerland with their gear! Benno Fürmann and Florian Lukas play the impetuous pair. Embellishing the story is a journalist from their home village, Luise (Johanna Wokalek), who provides a love interest and tears. Climbers who know the famous tale needn't be warned of spoilers: Shot on location, the film is slow, realistic, and excruciating in its latter stages. The difference between a 50- and 60-meter rope is life and death; a lost mitten means debilitating frostbite. There are no helmets, GPS units, or cell phones to call for rescue. This isn't a companion to climbing drama Vertical Limit but rather to the documentary Touching the Void. (The train-tunnel "gallery" windows drilled through the Nordwand are also familiar from Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction.) Director Philipp Stölzl makes the movie a tad more political (i.e., anti-Nazi) than it needs to be, but Fürmann's stoic performance reduces the story to its harsh, true fundamentals. Of the risks in climbing (as in life), he says, "You can be the best, but it's still a lottery."