"Quit everything to finally live", reads the original French poster.
And it is a good advice. A good film, a good sophomore feature (when most of these movies end up being inferior to the first try), with an original and attractive story that, as in a modern fairy tale, shows the process of a man's initiation into life in harmony with nature, an urgently necessary process on the American continent, where we devastate the environment, betraying the lifestyle of the original inhabitants of these lands.
In almost two hours it tells the story of Parisian Pierre (Thomas Salvador), a robotics engineer who, during a demonstration in province, feels the "call of the mountain", breaks with all his ties, and goes to live on a glacier in the Alps. Neither the attraction he feels for Léa (Louise Bourgoin), a beautiful chef who works in an Alpine restaurant, nor her elderly mother and her two brothers who arrive in search of him, keep Pierre from his fascination with solitude, and the cold snowy space. When a rock shift occurs in a place further away from the settlement where he lives with other climbers, Pierre goes into the mountain and, in the middle of the night, he sees strange lights that will lead him to a fascinating and mysterious encounter.
«The Mountain» belongs to that peculiar type of films that take place in vast snowy spaces or in deserts, which I avoid like the plague since in my childhood, when I saw films of cowboys crossing the desert or Dr. Zhivago crossing the steppe that left me exhausted! However, this story, which unfolds at a leisurely pace, always aroused my curiosity, and managed to fascinate me throughout Pierre's journey.
My only complaint is that, when he disappears and the rescue mission falls, Léa suddenly becomes superwoman and arrives at the difficult area where Pierre's initiation took place as if she were just going to walk the dog in the park, pushing too far my limit of credibility in the world of fantasy chivalry. Or maybe... Léa had already discovered the lights of the mountain... Otherwise, a recommendable film, unfairly underrated here.
