heinrich harrer beyond seven years in tibet

Escaping after nearly five years, Harrer and Aufschnaiter climb, hike and drag across rough terrain for 21 months. “Failure to summit?” Pitt’s Teutonic accent isn’t as deft as his Belfast-boy lilt in The Devil’s Own, but it’s no cheap Ah-nuld imitation, either. “Vat’s da charge?” asks Harrer with snide resignation. Their lack of success is followed by a British arrest as war breaks out. Harrer, impatient with domesticity, leaves his very pregnant wife, Ingrid (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), to join fellow Austrian Peter Aufschnaiter (an under-used David Thewlis) on the hard climb. Credit Pitt for not stinting on playing a vain über-opportunist who would cut any political corners for his own glory. Even before adding a scene showing Harrer accepting a Nazi pennant as he leaves a train station in Austria, they had figured Harrer for a cold bastard. Still, Annaud and screenwriter Becky Johnston haven’t been caught too short.

That leaves the damage-control wizards to sell a $65 million epic that has inadvertently cast the hottest hunk in showbiz as a Nazi. Here’s the complicated part: Somewhere between the end of shooting and the film’s release, it was discovered that from 1933 on, Harrer, now 85, was a member of Hitler’s SA (storm troopers) and, from 1938 on, was in the SS (the elite guard).

Somewhere between the film’s conventional heroics and its calculated sentiment, there is a stirring tale of the bond that grows between Harrer and the Dalai Lama, known as Kundun (His Holiness), beautifully played by 14-year-old Jamyang Wangchuk. There, in the Potala Palace, the young Dalai Lama is being trained by monks to take his place as the voice of Tibetan Buddhism. A blue-eyed, bottle-blond Brad Pitt, looking every inch the Aryan Adonis, stars as Harrer, who set out in 1939 to climb the killer Nanga Parbat, in the Himalayas, wound up in a British POW camp and escaped to find solace in the forbidden (to foreigners) Tibetan city of Lhasa. It gets complicated discussing Seven Years in Tibet, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s lavish, meandering and often moving film of a 1953 memoir by Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer.

Heinrich harrer beyond seven years in tibet