You'll be lucky if you have any cuticles left by the time you've finished watching `Touching the Void,' a nail-biting documentary that chronicles a true-life tale of miraculous survival. In 1985, two experienced mountain climbers, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, set out to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes. Although they successfully reached the summit, disaster struck as they were making their way back down. In the midst of a blinding blizzard, Joe slipped and broke his leg. The film, based on the book by Joe Simpson himself, recounts the grueling ordeal both men underwent in their efforts to make it back to their base camp alive.
To fully dramatize the experience, director Kevin MacDonald filmed one-on-one interviews with the two survivors (as well as a third companion who didn't go up the mountain with them) commenting and reflecting on the event, then employed actors to reenact the event as it originally happened. MacDonald has done an astonishing job capturing the edge-of-the-seat suspense inherent in the material, this despite the fact that we already know how it will all turn out. By plunging us directly into the heart of the action, we feel we are enduring every death-defying, heartbreaking moment right along with Joe and Simon. `Touching the Void' is, if nothing else, a tour-de-force of breathtaking cinematography and stunt work, one that makes us identify with the characters every step of the way.
Yet, for all its technical expertise, `Touching the Void' is, first and foremost, a human document, a testament to the endurance and survivability of both the human body and the human spirit. The amazing determination and perseverance demonstrated by the two men - especially by the then 25-year-old Joe as he struggles manfully, despite unendurable pain, to reach a place of safety - is inspiring even to those of us who do most of our adventuring from the comfort and safety of our living room armchair, a cold beer in hand. The film also reveals, through their actions and their words twenty some years later, the character of the two men. Simon has to live with the fact that, at a crucial moment in the crisis, he cut Joe loose from his line, consigning his partner to probable death so that he himself could survive an action for which many fellow mountaineers later criticized Simon. Yet, never once either then or now does Joe join in that criticism. On the psychological level, we learn of the cavalcade of emotions and feelings Joe underwent in those moments of greatest desperation when he looked impending death square in the face. This film is as much an adventure of the mind as it is of the body. Paradoxically, at the same time as the film is showing us the indomitableness of the human spirit, it is reminding us how much we humans even the most daring among us are, ultimately, at the mercy of a far greater, impersonal and indifferent force known as Nature.
Thanks to the compelling, stranger-than-fiction quality of the tale and the technical brilliance used to re-create it, `Touching the Void' will have you chewing your fingernails down to a nub.
