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Canberra Today 12°/15° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘The Himalayas’ (M) 124 mins ****

SINCE 1998, South Korean film-makers have made more than 1560 feature titles. We’ve seen only two in this century until Seok-Hoon Lee’s docu-drama telling about a group of South Korean mountain climbers who quietly achieved a record by climbing all the Himalayan peaks higher than 8000 metres.

Lee’s film isn’t about that achievement, although its characters refer to it often enough. It’s about courage, affection, mountaineering skills, hubris and tragedy. It begins late last century when Mootaek and a friend, enthusiastic but neither skilled or physically fit for the climb, pleaded to join a University climbing club on Kanchenjunga. Club captain Hong-Il dismissed them as unsuitable. They persevered. In time Hong-Il and Mootaek became friends.

About half the film deals with the misadventure that left Mootaek dead on a mountain and Hong-Il, despite foot damage that for 15 years prevented him from climbing at all, leading a party to recover the body. There’s intense dramatic power in this venture, arising as much from the risks as from Hong-Il’s egoism. Hong-Il’s acknowledgement of his domineering self-esteem takes a long time to arrive and the effect is “At last!”.

The Himalayan locations are breathtaking. The human values of the characters are interesting and effective. Korean cultural values and practices provide interesting contrasts with their western equivalents in a film based on a sport with perhaps the highest mortality rate of them all. It holds its own in comparison with Baltasar Kormakur’s “Everest” that we saw last September.

At Capitol 6

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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