Seven Years in Tibet Review

In the European summer of 1939, a few months before the outbreak of war, an arrogant young Austrian mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer, leaves his wife in Vienna to take part in an expedition to climb Nanga Prabat, a peak in the Himalayas. During the climb he`s badly injured, but still manages to save the life of expedition leader Peter Aufschnaiter, David Thewlis. The climb fails; the men are interned by the British; after several attempts, Heinrich and Peter manage to escape and, after a long and dangerous journey, arrive in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet... Seven Years In Tibet is one of two new films to deal with the Chinese invasion of the small Himalayan country - the other, Martin Scorsese`s Kundun, is coming early in the New Year. By concentrating on Harrer, director Jean-Jacques Annaud faces some problems; for example, his protagonist, played by Brad Pitt, was an apparently unregenerate Nazi. Also, we have to wade through an awful lot of preliminaries before getting to the point of the film - which is to celebrate the peaceful Tibetans and their boy ruler, the Dalai Lama, and to condemn the ruthless Chinese invasion. The second half of the film impresses visually (it was filmed in Argentina and Canada) and dramatically - and it`s designed to get audiences angry. I wonder when someone`s going to make a film about East Timor?