Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa
In Connecticut, at a Whole Foods Market behind the counter, stands a woman from Nepal who goes unnoticed. Lhakpa Sherpa, a single mother, takes public transportation to her job; no one around her suspects that she has summited Mount Everest multiple times in her home country. That staggering display of physical and mental fortitude is all the more impressive given that she was raised as an illiterate female in an entirely male dominated society. Now, however, her story of perseverance not only as a climber but also as an immigrant and survivor is told in “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” a stirring documentary by Lucy Walker (“Waste Land”).
Walker begins by showing portions of an interview with the exuberant Sherpa, who speaks in English earned after much labor and wears bright traditional clothing that will contrast sharply with her appearance later on dressed for mountain climbing. She shares her belief in a spiritual relationship with Everest which she sees as a female deity and uses as her polestar and remembers growing up among the Sherpa ethnic group in Nepal’s mountains. All Sherpas share the same last name and have first names corresponding to the day they were born.
The filmmaker intercuts recent footage shot in the vicinity of Sherpa’s home with images taken many years ago for a program about her first summit, seen against these backdrops, she describes how sexism limited her opportunities (she would drop off her brother at school every morning but was forbidden to attend). Eventually, her resolve led the government to sponsor an all-female expedition to climb Everest under Sherpa’s leadership. Multiple cinematographers were enlisted by Walker to capture various plotlines in different locations throughout the doc, one follows Sunny, Sherpa’s eldest daughter, as she wrestles with deep-seated trauma. The most visually stunning shots are those recorded during the climb at high altitude amid inhospitable weather conditions. Such real-life, as opposed to staged, moments of peril immediately make the viewer aware of the risk taken by the person behind the camera.
But it is on those snow covered slopes or inside a tent that bends to the whim of the wind where Sherpa feels most in control of her fate. When chaos erupts in her personal life, Everest helps her reset. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, she reveals that after getting pregnant with her son out of wedlock, she could not go back home to her parents because they were ashamed of her condition. Only when she first scaled Everest and became famous throughout Nepal did her father recognize her worth by saying that now she was equal to a son in status. And while this act did provide validation for Sherpa, it also speaks volumes about how disturbingly little regard Nepali society at large has for women both within their own households and in professional settings.
Working with many editors, Walker has managed to avoid simple triumphalism in her biography of Sherpa. She appears tough while climbing but delicate when away from it particularly after marrying George Dijmarescu, a Romanian climber, and moving to the United States with him. Most of the gut-wrenching footage is from Sherpa’s most recent climb her record breaking 10th. The significance goes beyond outside acclaim because this time she must regain self possession after years of abuse by Dijmarescu, who hurt her not only at home but on the mountain that was chronicled in “High Crimes,” a troubled expedition tale published in 2009.
The dissonance between a woman who cut off her hair early in this biography to pass as a man so she could work as an Everest guide and an immigrant trapped in another country with a violent alcoholic husband makes “Mountain Queen” a gratifyingly jagged tribute.
Yet for all its complexities and contradictions, what I found most surprising about Walker’s book was its simplest insight. The inclusion of one of Dijmarescu’s friends, who agrees to speak with Shiny (Sherpa’s youngest daughter) about a side of her father she had never considered. The conversation does not excuse the monster (or Yeti, as Sherpa calls him) he became; nor does it indulge in righteous narrative moralizing about bad people. It recognizes his humanity and wounds both for the sake of his children, but also as a way of saying that personal sorrows can never justify inflicting pain on others.
Sherpa could have been inspirational simply by virtue of where she has been physically and metaphorically along her mountainous route lined with clouds. But it takes another kind of courage to show us one’s weakest moment during one’s strongest years, when fearlessness fails us for just an instant. In Walker’s hands we see that genuine humility and positive outlook come not from staring down walls but from facing them, when they’re as big as mountains and won’t budge.
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