Elegantly balancing on the narrowest ridges imaginable in spectacular climbing documentary The Alpinist ★★★★☆

A few years ago, young Canadian mountaineering super-talent Marc-André Leclerc owned a mobile phone for some time, until a wild fox took it off during one of his climbing trips. He could have bought a new one and, like the climbers of his generation, tossed the photos and videos of all those ropeless rock and ice walls onto the internet. Carefully working on his status as the biggest daredevil of the international climbing elite. But Leclerc was fine with that phoneless existence.

The spectacular The Alpinist by Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, specialists in the mountaineering genre, paints an admirably precise picture of a queer boy who really doesn’t have to be the subject of a documentary. That makes the documentary three years after the Oscar-winning Free Solo to more than the latest climbing spectacle film: how do you film someone whose priority is not completing a film, but taking that seemingly impossible route to the next peak? As if Leclerc and the camera gradually end up in a glorified blinking light relationship.

The makers of The Alpinist know Leclerc as a 23-year-old myth on internet forums for climbers (which mentions an unknown boy who travels very difficult routes in record time), when they decide to film him for two years. Uncomfortably, he wiggles in front of the film camera for the first time: a friendly, shy boy who doesn’t talk too deeply about his only fascination, followed by climbing sessions in which he elegantly moves upwards, using the narrowest ledges imaginable as the only grip. Alternately, they also tell about the history of mountaineering – a context that makes Leclerc’s achievements all the more impressive.

The documentary soon also presents itself as a superlative of Free Solo† The main character in that film, Alex Honnold, tells with wide eyes how Leclerc now surpasses him in terms of pace, in the complexity of climbing routes and especially in the choice of surface. Honnold limited himself to reliable rock, Leclerc increasingly focuses on more unstable ice by definition. Other climbers are also concerned about the increasing risks to which the insatiable Leclerc is exposing himself: question of youthful hubris? One Reinhold Messner, an ex-climber who seems to have walked straight away from a documentary by Werner Herzog, shows understanding: if death is not an option, it means nothing to be safely back on the ground afterwards.

You eventually wonder how far you can go as a climbing documentary maker in filming your protagonist’s daredevil. The Alpinist provides appropriate answers.