Avis des critiques

Ozturk’s cinematography is often spectacular, capturing breathtaking moments of snowy eloquence, and intimate ones of climbers performing tasks while dangling aside a mountain or from other places unthinkable for most of us.

There must be some other powerful attraction to the challenge that has to do with its very impossibility — in fact, with the likelihood of death — that pulls these men. And when the film gets into this thorny question, via the philosophizing of mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer and others, the film is at its most fascinating. There’s a kind of terrifying yet beautiful insanity to what we are being shown here, which is as much a tale of unearthly willpower as of superhuman physical effort.

You’ve probably seen mountains in movies as spectacular as in Meru, some of them shot from helicopters (or they’re CGI). Touching the Void was a wow, and I’ll bet there are films I’ve missed (some featuring Anker, Chin, Ozturk, and Krakauer) that are heavier on the awe. But this one gets my vote for the gnarliest.

The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on the big screen... We see clouds in time-lapse twine and billow around Meru’s base like the colored skirts of Annabelle the dancer in those earliest nineteenth-century Edison films.

The film is weighed down with interview footage, a lot of which is essentially fan service—how great these guys are, how courageous they are, how tough they are. And I’m not arguing they’re not, just questioning the cinematic value of such an approach. “Meru” is billed as an awe-inspiring nature documentary, and it works best when it remembers to be one.

The beautiful, intimate cinematography by Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk is only one of the reasons to watch Meru, but it is the most immediately compelling. Chin is a world-class photographer famous for his National Geographic and Outside covers and essays. The younger Ozturk has built a reputation for his painting and video essays of extreme locations.

Thankfully free of the usual triumph-of-the-will score, “Meru” is an ultrasmooth blend of conventional documentary techniques — the talking-head interview; the back-in-the-day photograph — and uncommon ambition. The immediacy and clarity of the images (Mr. Chin and Mr. Ozturk did most of the filming) is critical, capturing the grandeur of the Himalayas in shots both mystical and menacing. So when Mr. Krakauer describes the mountain’s location as “the point where heaven and earth and hell all come together,” his meaning could not be clearer.

Oddly, the film doesn’t mention until the end credits, that Chin is one of the directors, alongside his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Without that knowledge, it can be distracting to wonder how the hell a camera crew got directly above Anker on the mountain’s almost vertical face. Only for a moment, though. Ultimately, Meru is a doc that aims to inspire pure awe, and if it achieves nothing more, that’s not so bad.

Surely, praise is beyond deserved just for the sheer will of Chin and Ozturk’s impractical feat of vérité. And yet, it’s hard to deny crucial shortcomings in Meru’s depiction of big wall climbing.

The against-all-odds nature of the enterprise is repeatedly emphasized — to an almost wearisome degree. As the catalogue of hazards and "mega-risks" accumulates, many may well conclude that these particular mountaineers are more crazy and irresponsible than they are inspirational and admirable — not least because they're clearly so concerned not only with executing their feat but also simultaneously shooting as much footage as possible along the way.

While you might well leave “Meru” thinking it requires a degree of craziness to undertake such perilous task s —the protagonists admit some willingness to risk death is necessary — their personalities are nonetheless so relatable that the docu sports an unusually high degree of emotional involvement for an extreme-sports chronicle