DVD.net : Seven Years In Tibet

Nazi Heinrich Harrer, a member of the notorious SS, was undertaking some gung-ho mountaineering in the Himalayas at the start of the Second World War.

To esape capture and internment, he fled to Tibet, where he sheltered during the entire War. Then our lucky Nazi made his fortune by writing his account of those years, Seven Years in Tibet. At one time, a copy of that book was found in every self-respecting home.

This was one Nazi who somehow managed to do the world some good. For Harrer's book became the main Western memoir of Tibet before the Chinese occupation. It's our collective memory of that land before the Communists started to smash Tibetan culture, and to fill the region with Chinese immigrants to try to dilute and destroy the Tibetan nationality. The book is still one of the Dalai Lama's greatest allies, as he ceaselessly tours the world on behalf of his oppressed people.

Harrer saw a nation in transition, on the eve of destruction. It's a fascinating but ultimately intensely saddening book -- the same is true of Annaud's movie.

In some ways this is a beautiful and elegiacal movie. It doesn't spare Harrer - this Aryan mountaineer is shown as arrogant and unfeeling and totally egocentric, though softening slowly under the influence of the gentle Tibetans. And from his initial position as a member of the supposed Master-Race he is reduced to futile raging against the destruction of the society he slowly comes to love.

This is beautifully filmed, and sumptously decorated -- landscapes, sets and costumes combine to create a pageant of exotic beauty, which makes the barbarity of destruction all the more apparent.

But there are flaws. One is in its pivotal casting of Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer. I've seen and enjoyed Pitt in other roles. Here, though, he is just too seemingly spoilt and petulant in a peculiarly American way. It's just too hard to see him as a Nazi golden-boy.

There is however a standout performance by Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk as the very young Dalia Lama, who is determined to learn all he can from Harrer about life behind the barrier of the Himalayas. Interestingly, the Dalai Lama's mother is played, very convincingly, by his real-life sister, Jetsun Pema.

The other flaw is in its time-sequencing. These seven years in Tibet could just as easily have been seven months. There's no sense of progression of time. The action moves along in an arbitrary and chopped-up manner which leaves us guessing whether the previous scene took place two weeks earlier, or two years. It lacks that essential inner-coherency -- we can't grow with the characters.

But the movie succeeds in its main aim, of helping us realise, more than half a century later, that the Chinese Government did commit an almighty wrong. This makes us realise just what a tragedy that invasion was -- and realise with real anguish that it is a wrong which most probably now can never be put right.