Fanny Valette wishes she hadn’t gone mountain climbing in the Balkans in Abel Ferry’s HIGH LANE.
In the wake of an emergency room tragedy that left a patient dead due to her inability to per- form a timely tracheotomy, Paris trauma nurse Chloë (Fanny Valette) reconnects with old friends for a rock-climbing expe- dition in the Balkans. Led by the experienced Fred (Nicolas Giraud) and his girlfriend Karin (Maud Wyler), and with its ranks filled out by Chloë’s current boy- friend Luke (Johan Libéreau) and her ex-lover William (Raphaël Lenglet), the party heads for Croatia’s Veliki Mountain in the sprawling Risnjak Massif, home of Europe’s longest foot bridge and other challenges to the laws of gravity. Finding the park en- trance shuttered, the friends cheat authority (if not fate) by using their gear to climb up and over the impediment, never sus- pecting the path into the woods has been barred for a very good reason.
Though tensions among the
climbers lead to sniping and a few dust-ups en route, director Ferry and screenwriters Johnanne Ber- nard and Louis-Paul Desanges (cowriter of MUTANTS, whose director, David Morlet, rates a credit crawl acknowledgement)
keep the group responding to threats both natural and man- made rather than settling in for any protracted conversations. Crafted with an eye on the clock, HIGH LANE offers up a substan- tial action setpiece every 10 minutes through the film’s mid- section, from said footbridge crumbling like a house of cards before all and sundry are safely across to the other side and sev- ered guide lines stranding the climbers on the rock face 3,000 feet up to a gauntlet of mantraps, not the least of which are a spike- filled pit and a snare-triggered crossbow. Ferry et al take their time before letting anyone die, allowing their attractive yet ten- able protagonists to manifest true joy for what they are doing (ex- cept for Libéreau, whose rebound beau is only in it for the love for a woman he seems to know is out of his league) and the requi- site skills, tenacity, and courage before the axe falls. HIGH LANE treads on disappointingly well- trammeled ground for its final act, when the survivors unmask their tormentor as a bog standard forest cretin, with the requisite log cabin-cum-abattoir and match- ing taste for human flesh. This
revelation cheapens promising material as the characters are, as is the custom for this sort of thing, taken captive, bound and brutalized, only to escape and attempt to turn the tables on their gibbering antagonist by outdoing the savage for sheer savagery. There are occasional grace notes, mostly down to the playing of Ferry’s game cast (and the use of Supergrass’ 1995 song “Alright” as a testa- ment, however ironic, to the in- domitability of youth), but not enough to expunge the aftertaste of over-familiarity.
Shot in southeastern France (subbing for Croatia), HIGH LANE looks exceptionally fine on this DVD transfer, framed at an anamorphic 2.35:1 to take ad- vantage of the natural production value. (Most of the film’s best moments take place in sparkling daylight, which adds an extra layer of incongruity to the pro- ceedings.) The Dolby 5.1 origi- nal French soundtrack (with optional English subtitles) is the way to go, as the English dub is execrable and tinny. (Unfor- tunately, Netflix offers only the English language variant for in- stant streaming.) Bonus features
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