La montagne

The mountain is obviously the main character of this unique and amazing French film which topic, scheme, reminds me a bit SUR LES CHEMINS NOIRS, another French drama starring Jean Dujardin, about a man searching after himself among the wilderness, nature or more precisely the mountain. Who could be bored by such a film? Of course, there is no real story, no suspense, it's not a thriller, just a movie destined to nature lovers, splendid settings goers. A very unusual and worth seeing movie offering me - because I love this actress - a more than ever so charming Louise Bourgoin. Yes, I think about SUR LES CHEMINS NOIRS, more or less the same story but told from another angle. But it is not PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK either, concerning the eerie element, where absolutely no explanation is given.

The star of this pleasantly strange film without doubt is the mountain itself, set as it is, almost entirely on the snowy peaks and rockfaces of the Mont Blanc massif above Chamonix.

As to the question of what it's about, it's about a middle aged man caught in the humdrum of daily life, (work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep..) who decides it's time for a change, and at the same time, its about the mountain itself, also coming of age and struggling, but in its case, because of the loss of its glacier.

Thomas Salvador stars as the man in question. It's something of an indulgence by him, as he gets to direct as well.

I'm pretty confident in saying, that this won't go in the direction you think it might. There are plenty of films about middle-aged crises, but only one that covers it in this way. It's the middle age crisis of the man, and of the mountain.

"Quit everything to finally live", reads the original French poster.

And it is a good advice. A good film, a good sophomore feature (when most of these movies end up being inferior to the first try), with an original and attractive story that, as in a modern fairy tale, shows the process of a man's initiation into life in harmony with nature, an urgently necessary process on the American continent, where we devastate the environment, betraying the lifestyle of the original inhabitants of these lands.

In almost two hours it tells the story of Parisian Pierre (Thomas Salvador), a robotics engineer who, during a demonstration in province, feels the "call of the mountain", breaks with all his ties, and goes to live on a glacier in the Alps. Neither the attraction he feels for Léa (Louise Bourgoin), a beautiful chef who works in an Alpine restaurant, nor her elderly mother and her two brothers who arrive in search of him, keep Pierre from his fascination with solitude, and the cold snowy space. When a rock shift occurs in a place further away from the settlement where he lives with other climbers, Pierre goes into the mountain and, in the middle of the night, he sees strange lights that will lead him to a fascinating and mysterious encounter.

«The Mountain» belongs to that peculiar type of films that take place in vast snowy spaces or in deserts, which I avoid like the plague since in my childhood, when I saw films of cowboys crossing the desert or Dr. Zhivago crossing the steppe that left me exhausted! However, this story, which unfolds at a leisurely pace, always aroused my curiosity, and managed to fascinate me throughout Pierre's journey.

My only complaint is that, when he disappears and the rescue mission falls, Léa suddenly becomes superwoman and arrives at the difficult area where Pierre's initiation took place as if she were just going to walk the dog in the park, pushing too far my limit of credibility in the world of fantasy chivalry. Or maybe... Léa had already discovered the lights of the mountain... Otherwise, a recommendable film, unfairly underrated here.

Parisian Pierre's Esoteric Babble with Mountains!

Imagine a middle-aged corporate French guy who's having a midlife crisis, deciding to trade in his suits for hiking boots and becoming a mountaineer. I saw Thomas Salvador self-cast himself as Pierre, lol what a narcissistic move! He's climbing mountains, hallucinating, and probably needs a good therapist. It's a cringeworthy watch! I really loved some shots, but I thought the surreal sequence had some significance. However, I swear it had little to no significance to the plot or themes at all, and the setup lacked a convincing payoff. Maybe he wanted to emulate the works of Carlos Reygadas or Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The very flat acting of the actor-director contributes to making all this unconvincing. I wanted to watch The Summit of the Gods (2021) after this and some scenes from Stefan Jarl's Land of the Lapps (1994). 2 stars for the outdoor shots, but the rest of the film fell short.