Co-written and directed by its star, Thomas Salvador, this atmospheric and suggestive outdoors drama follows a lonely man's attempt to conquer the French Alps.
” But “The Mountain” is far more elliptical than that. And, although Pierre’s intentions remain debatable, the story becomes a subtle treatise on solitude, ecology and, it would seem, following your bliss.Pierre’s relationship with Léa , an increasingly friendly local chef he meets along the way, is one of the picture’s few concessions to a more traditional story.
A less successful attempt at a subplot finds Pierre taking a minor spill on the mountain. It’s enough to require a helicopter rescue and a hospital visit, but it feels like a perfunctory segue. An intriguing, enigmatic turn into sci-fi territory also crops up as Pierre discovers a group of small, light-bearing entities living in the nooks and crannies of the mountains. These beings , which resemble slinking, sequined bean bags, end up sharing their capacity to glow with Pierre as they make physical contact. What these strange creatures exactly represent may be in the eye of the beholder, though cautionary hints about climate change and the eroding Alps provide a clue.
It all leads to a trippy interlude in which a gleamingly lit Pierre gets sucked into an icy mountain and floats around amorphously within its walls. The homegrown-style visual effects here lend the sequence a comfortably low-tech appeal that remains until the end as Pierre, now frequently aglow, ostensibly comes to terms with his existence.
Although “The Mountain” moves at a somewhat, er, glacial pace, it becomes a more immersive than tiring experience. And if a few too many moments go underexplained , Salvador infuses the film with a surreal enough tone to justify his austere narrative approach.