Seven Years in Tibet

Plot:
Heinrich Harrer is an Austrian national and a Nazi sympathizer. He leaves Austria in 1939 to climb a mountain in the Himalayas. Through a series of circumstances (including POW camp), he and fellow climber Peter Aufschnaiter become the only two foreigners in the Tibetan Holy City of Lhasa. There, Heinrich's life changes forever as he becomes a close confidant to the Dalai Lama. - Afterburner

Comment:
Barely resembling two movies directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Little Buddha and especially The Last Emperor), Jean-Jacques Annaud only manages to reproduce part of the athmosphere those movies had but almost definitely fails to convey the same emotions.

Basically, the movie is a sort of biography of Heinrich Harrer, a german mountain climber, that after a number of misadventures becomes tutor and friend of the Dalai Lama in the period in which Tibet has been submitted to China. In order to cover 10 years there are various jumps in time, usually emphasized by subtitles and voice-overs taken from the diary and letters that Harrer writes.

The most evident problem of the movie is that the character's development is quite strange and discontinous. In the first part, there seem to be too much concern to show the negative side of Harrer's personality, his failures and his selfish attitude; in the second part, everything goes on far too quickly, he seems to change abruptly and we soon have a far too captivating character doing too many good actions considering how the story began!

The whole movie is not very homogeneous, there are too many differences in rhythm, various parts seem to have been squeezed too much, others to have been enlarged for no evident reason. The result of this is that the movie intention is a bit blurred. If it was mainly aimed to show the effects of external agents on the Tibetan society then it definitely spent too much time on Harrer's personal story; if, as it seems more likely, it was going to show Harrer's spiritual (and physical) journey, then the last part of the movie is quite out of place since the focus shifts to events that are marginally affected by Harrer's actions and that scarcely influences him. In both cases, the beginning of the movie is surely the worst part since it wastes too many scenes showing 'useless' events that are forgotten as soon as the story proceeds to something more interesting.

The scenes portraying the friendship between the young Dalai Lama and Harrer are the best part of the movie and the actors show their best. Brad Pitt's performance is quite acceptable in every moment of the movie, David Thewlis (playing Harrer's 'friend' Peter Aufschnaiter) gets the prize for the less inspired acting while Jamyang Wang Chuck (playing the 12-14 years old Dalai Lama years) is surely the most charming.