North Face

The fearsome north face of the Eiger mountain became the object of National Socialist obsession during the 1930s. An Olympic gold medal was promised to its first summit party — preferably of good 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 the climbing drama Vertical Limit, but rather to the documentary Touching the Void. Director Philipp Stölzl makes the movie a tad more political (that is, 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.”