![]() ![]() ![]() Based on Harrer's memoirs, film ran into numerous problems, including the revelation that Harrer had Nazi ties, Chi na's sensitivity to the storyline, and India's refusal to allow filming. Pitt's screen presence is forceful and his performance capable but hampered by a somewhat labored Austrian accent. Sweeping vistas and snowcapped mountain scenery does little to aid the sluggish and unfocused narrative, which tries to cover too many subplots and doesn't really get going until halfway through. When he and fellow climber Peter Aufschnaiter (Thewlis) escape, they travel to Tibet where Harrer bonds with and becomes a tutor to the young Dalai Lama (Wangchuk). He hightails it back to Austria and takes up mountain climbing again.Big budget epic of a cold hearted Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer (Pitt) who becomes a WWII POW in a British internment camp in India. Of course, it is not Heinrich who will suffer the consequences of the splendid and doomed defiance he recommends. It is clear to the meanest intelligence that the Tibetans haven’t the slightest chance against the Red Chinese Army, but Heinrich, especially, is meant to get rather a fillip to his credibility by what is actually a very cheap tone of self-righteous moral indignation toward his former friend and Tibetan patron who seeks an accommodation with the Chinese. This is the Chinese invasion and subjugation of Tibet. Its ends up passing too lightly over the conflict between Heinrich and Peter and trivializing it so that it can get to the big, world-historical, geo-political conflict which might confirm its epic status. Yet, despite the glorious scenery, the film is a bore. The greater the distance of the journey, the greater the depth of the purification.” He, of course, has walked a very long distance from his prison camp in India, but he and Peter are accepted by the Tibetans partly because of admiration for their amazing feat in so footing it. It is a land, he writes his young son Rolf, where people “walk long distances to holy places” believing that this “purifies the soul of bad deeds. Its point is to show the arrogant and solitary Heinrich ( “no wonder you’re always alone,” says Peter to him: “no one can stand your miserable company” ), who in real life seems to have been a dedicated Nazi, becoming gradually humanized, first by his friendship with Peter and second by the example of the gentle people among whom he finds himself. The story has potentially epic dimensions. Heinrich stays until the Chinese invade and take over the country, then he returns to Austria to try to establish a relationship with the son who was born shortly after he left in 1939 and whom he has never seen. Peter marries and Heinrich becomes a tutor and companion to the young Dalai Lama (Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuck). He and his fellow Teuton climber, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis) manage to escape and make their way to Tibet, where they settle down and are accepted in spite of a deep local suspicion of and hostility towards foreigners. Seven Years in Tibet from Tri-Star, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, stars the egregious Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber in the Himalayas who is interned by the British in India as an enemy alien at the outbreak of the Second World War.
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