Psyche
Producer Posing Productions
Reviewed byEd Douglas
DateWednesday, 14 November 2007
Rating
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Steve McClure and Andy Kirkpatrick feature on Alistair Lee’s new film Psyche, the former in a mini-portrait and the latter with Ian Parnell on an attempt to climb Torre Egger in winter. (‘He is totally insane,’ Kirkpatrick says of his partner at one point. The mind boggles. Pot? Kettle?) They form two films in a weighty trilogy, the final part being the return of the king Dave Birkett on the first ascent of a new E8 on the Isle of Skye.
Lee’s great strength is a kind of impish invention and a strong sense of humour and those qualities are evident in these films. Taken together, they feel rather like a magazine program, with no big statement to be made, just a sense of what Lee has been interested in this year. There’s nothing wrong with that and I’m sure his fans will be pleased with this offering.
Least satisfactory was the Patagonian film, through no fault of any of the participants. Plagued by bad weather, Parnell and Kirkpatrick first change objectives and then spend a lot of time lying cocooned in their sleeping bags in a pool of melt water. Luckily, Kirkpatrick is a born entertainer, like a young Ronnie Barker wrapped in Thinsulate, and he brushes any lack of action aside with an avalanche of one-liners. The footage these two brought home has had Lee’s creative fairy dust sprinkled on top – he’s perhaps the most visually creative of the three approaches at work here.
The story-telling can be a bit creaky at times, most noticeable in the McClure film, but he gets the fun of climbing, that engagingly pointless questing that takes Birkett to Skye and back twice in one week to grab his line, or sees Kirkpatrick tottering across a frozen lake as the ice cracks beneath him. McClure was even worse describing falling off in the same place on one route as being ‘quite disheartening’. Don Quixotes, all the mad pack of them.
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