《徒手攀岩》

Starring: Alex Honnold

Director: E. Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin

IF you’re afraid of heights, “Free Solo” is not the film for you. It’s a nerve-racking, vertigo-inducing portrait of a man who scales cliffs with none of the usual safety gear — no ropes, no harness, just a bag of chalk and his bare hands — and it’s made all the more intimidating by the use of relatively new camera technology — including drones, remote-operated rigs, and super-long zoom lenses — that effectively strap audiences right in there with Alex Honnold as he claws his way up a 3,000-foot (914-meter) wall with nothing to protect his fall.

Now, for those who love the thrill of high-adrenaline adventure documents, National Geographic’s “Free Solo” will be a hard experience to top. And yet, as a follow-up to “Meru” — a mountain-climbing documentary that was, quite literally, awesome to behold — co-directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin outdo themselves with this daredevil project, which demanded a crew that was willing to dangle right alongside their subject on several of his most daunting free-solo challenges (the camera team takes precautions, at least).

Honnold’s favorite way to climb is without the aid of ropes or other life-protecting gear, a practice termed “free soloing.” Is his love of this method courageous or psychotic? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, though Honnold’s extreme sporting, which he’s expanded into a lucrative profession, might better be defined by a simple mantra: “Don’t tell Mom.”

Honnold’s mother, Dierdre Wolownick, makes an appearance about midway through the film, speaking with the resigned clarity of a parent who has recognized that her child is going to follow his bliss, sanity and common sense be damned.

Chin and Vasarhelyi approach Honnold’s quest like a meta action movie, concerning themselves as much with the rehearsal of the climb, along the so-called Freerider route, as with the free solo itself. This helps us become familiar with some of El Cap’s (as it is nicknamed) most difficult sections, notably an area that mountaineers term the “Boulder Problem,” where you have a choice of either leaping from one part of the cliff face to the other, or doing a complicated karate-kick-like move to balance yourself and then shift, with more than a bit of contortion, between grips. Knowing what’s coming, and recognizing what has to be done within a minuscule margin of error, only increases the tension when the moment of truth arrives.

Brilliantly photographed by Chin, Clair Popkin and Mikey Schaefer, often from angles and positions you wouldn’t think possible, “Free Solo” never entirely escapes the trappings of a NatGeo-sanctioned documentary. From the soaring score by Marco Beltrami to the pie-eyed awe often afforded its subject, this is in many ways a white-knuckle brand extension for Honnold above all else. Still, the film frequently treads into knotty territory. Chin appears onscreen several times to wonder at the ethics of filming his subject, whom he also considers a good friend, in what could very likely be his final moments. And this moral predicament extends to Honnold’s relationship with his new girlfriend, Sanni McCandless.

At one point, with a bit of a sociopathic glint, Honnold says that he’d always choose scaling a mountain over committing to a life-partner. And McCandless seems to fully grasp this dilemma, attempting, with much effort, to walk that fine line between commendable support and understandable apprehension. Her perspective helps to puncture the myth of Honnold’s feat as solely superhuman. There’s plenty of selfishness here as well, and if that doesn’t dim the glow of his achievement, it at least casts it in a much more sobering, down-to-earth light. Is one person’s precarious dream worth their significant other’s sustained torment? The question hangs there like, well, a man clinging to a precipice.

The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

(SD-Agencies)