Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (June 25, 2004)

Touching the Void

MGM Home Video VHS and DVD 1 hr 47 mins Director: Kevin Macdonald

Director Kevin Macdonald's docu-drama "Touching the Void" is an unrelenting exercise in the logic of survival and the subtle repercussions of broken trust. Its power lies in the sober, matter-of-fact way the story is related by its subjects, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates. One day in Peru in 1985, they decided to climb the virgin face of Siula Grande in the Andes to glorify the closure of their mountain climbing expedition - only to have it crumble. What Macdonald does brilliantly, however, is to relate their story through separate interviews with the pair, and then flavor the perils by re-creating them. It's a tricky business, having the real subjects tell their story and then using actors Aaron Nicholas (Yates) and Brendan Mackey (Simpson), which could have upset the balance of the film. Instead, the re-creations enhance the subjects' hazardous situations and the audience's experience.

The story of Simpson and Yates is one of strangely dissolute ego and depressive vulnerability. Simpson talks of being in the best shape of his life when he set out to climb Siula Grande with his veteran partner Yates. They were both young, egotistical, brash and determined men who had enough experience to enact the expedition safely. They reached the summit within a day and started down immediately to beat a snowstorm. Their descent of the mountain (ominously told by Yates as "when most accidents occur") is nightmarish. Both are tied together and Simpson slips, breaks his leg, and slides down, dragging his doppelganger Yates, who manages to stop them. Simpson dangles over an unseen cliff with an unaware Yates struggling to keep his footing. It's the first of several agonizing moments for the audience.

In confrontational and very moving moments, director Macdonald manages to keep us not only guessing what will happen, but specifically what choices would be made, and asking ourselves would we make the same. Nature itself, both external and, especially, internal, seems to swallow Simpson and Yates and transform their sensibilities. They bravely relate their own fears and weaknesses in such a deadpan way that we cannot help but relate to their feelings of desperation and guilt. They become not the tragic, romanticized heroes that have survived the worst (there are no tears in either ones' eyes), but honest men, whose experience has elevated them beyond their own self-worth.

"Touching the Void" may not be for everyone, especially because of its strangely downbeat feeling. It comes across as a pessimist's success story: Both survive only to discover their own fragile place in the universe (there is an ironic note at the end which says that Simpson is a motivational speaker). Both Simpson and Yates look dazed relating their story, even after almost 20 years. -Joe Ramirez

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