Documentaries as theatrical releases are really taking off these days. With his controversial and extremely well-timed Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore has broken his own record for highest-grossing documentary of all time, set by his previous movie, Bowling for Columbine. Perhaps his success has something to do with the new upsurge in documentary-making.
In contrast to Moore’s overheated agit-prop, however, is the British mountain-climbing documentary, Touching the Void. Where Moore is outspoken in his aim (to unseat George W Bush), Touching the Void takes the more usual documentary approach of simply telling the (true) story. It does so with the help of what is called docudrama, a form likely to send one hurrying in the other direction. The recreation of events can often produce a sense of artificiality rather than the required authenticity.
But these are not problems from which Touching the Void suffers. The recreation or reconstruction is so well done that one pauses only for a split second to wonder how they did it, and it is skilfully interwoven with the direct testimony of the main players.
Joe Simpson, on whose best-selling book it is based, is protagonist number one. An enthusiastic mountain-climber, he admits to the thrill of risk and the lure of a challenge — in this case scaling Siula Grande, a 7 000m peak in the Andes. Previous attempts had failed. As if to make the already scary enterprise more difficult, Simpson and his fellow climber Simon Yates decided to do it in the old-style Alpine way: that is, just the two of them lashed together. Simpson was then 25, Yates 21. At base camp, without communications or rescue services on call, was someone they had met and rather casually recruited for this task.
With a version of that famous British stiff upper lip, Simpson and Yates laconically describe what happened on that climb — and, more importantly, on the way down. Eighty percent of climbing accidents, they inform us proleptically, happen on the way down. And so it was with them, leaving Yates with the nightmarish choice of abandoning the badly injured Simpson or losing his own life, and Simpson with a battle to survive against impossible odds and in the teeth of repeated disaster.
This is incredibly gripping stuff, more gripping than your average or even above-average fictional thriller, despite the fact that we know (because we can see their faces, calmly relating the events) that they did not die. My favourite moment is when Simpson says that he had long been an atheist and now, faced with almost certain death, he still found himself unable to try bargaining with God. Now there’s a man with nerve.
Touching the Void is utterly compelling from start to finish, the quiet narration very effectively offsetting the reconstructed drama. And what drama it is, whether we are lost with Simpson in a crevasse decorated with absurdly lavish confectionery-type shapes, or when the icy white landscape of the mountain seems to envelop and almost suffocate the very screen.