NEW YORK, NY.- Documentaries in which people climb very tall things have a remarkable track record. “Man on Wire,” James Marsh’s 2008 recounting of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the twin towers in 1974, is one of the most acclaimed and successful documentaries of all time. Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi have made two celebrated films about the sport: “Meru” in 2015 and “Free Solo” in 2018. Just do a quick search for “climbing documentaries” and you’ll find dozens — it’s clearly a genre people love.
That’s undoubtedly due in part to the fact that most of us (myself included) will never, ever attempt to scale a 3,000-foot cliff without ropes. These movies show us what we can’t otherwise see. Plus, in contrast to the manufactured safety of a fiction film, a documentary is heart-pounding. Your head knows they probably will get out alive — but your stomach sure doesn’t.
There’s another reason these movies are so popular, though, and it’s more psychological. As a nonclimber with an aversion to physical risk, I find it hard to fathom what drives those who choose, of their own free will, to put themselves into extreme physical situations that could easily kill them. It must mean something more to them than oxygen-deprived thrills — but what? Two gripping documentaries on Netflix this week come at that question from different directions but offer similar answers.
Lucy Walker’s “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” is a biographical documentary about Lhakpa Sherpa, a Nepalese mountain climber who holds the women’s world record for the most summits of Mount Everest, 10 in all. (And not many men have summited more.) I expected a portrait of an incredibly strong woman, and that’s an apt description for “Mountain Queen.” But Lhakpa’s story is much more complicated than that. Through interviews and footage shot on Everest, Lhakpa — who lives in Connecticut with her teenage daughters — reveals the many obstacles she’s had to overcome, including patriarchal ideas about climbing in her home culture and an abusive marriage to a fellow climber once she moved to the United States.
Most important, she shows what drives someone like her toward this kind of extreme sport, and it mainly boils down to wanting to live a life of significance. But Lhakpa’s aim is less about being famous and more about paving the way to a better future for herself and her children. “I want to be somebody. I want to do something good,” she says. “I want to show my two girls how to be brave.”
“Skywalkers: A Love Story,” directed by Jeff Zimbalist, is about a different kind of climbing. (It is not about “Star Wars.”) As the subtitle suggests, it’s the tale of the romance of Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, two Russian “rooftoppers” who became famous in 2015 for climbing incredibly tall buildings and construction sites and posting pictures from the top to Instagram. (This is, of course, very illegal, which is part of the thrill.)
Each is a loner and worked solo at first, seeing rooftopping as an art. Some rooftoppers are in it for the stunts and the fame, but both Nikolau and Beerkus were drawn to the prospect of seeing urban landscapes from the perspective of the sky and perhaps adding beauty to them as well. Nikolau is a trained gymnast whose Instagram photos often showed her striking a dancer’s pose; when Beerkus joined her, they fell in love, and he became part of the art.
“Skywalkers” follows the couple across years of climbing, their fame growing with each new feat. There’s plenty of death-defying footage from buildings all over the world. But the film is mostly about their romance and the ways that learning to trust each other, to look out for each other, mirrors the way love develops and perseveres even in rocky times. That’s part of the art, too.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
