Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing has many echoes of Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018), including the at-first seemingly underwhelming premise for their respective films. We know how it ended. They scaled Mount Everest. They landed on the moon. What’s the point?Chazelle managed to turn his film into an urgent family drama, around a grieving father. One of the towering achievements of First Man was underlining how the triumph of the space race ventured through a series of funerals. Many paid with their lives or were exposed to significant mortal danger, while working with technology that was still not as state-of-the-art as it is today.Similarly, after seeing images of ‘traffic jams’ near the Everest summit in the last few years, it’s easy to underestimate the peril most climbers faced at a time when no one had scaled the peak. A beautiful thing about Peedom’s film is how it balances the sweeping scale of the expedition, with the intimate resolve of its stoic protagonist.It’s love at first sight for a pre-adolescent Tenzing (Samdrup Dorje Lama), living in the Tibetan plateau, as he gapes at Everest from afar. When he meets British mountaineer George Mallory (Johnny Flynn) in 1924, ahead of his third (and final) expedition, is when he learns people are trying to climb it. Worshipped as a Goddess Chomolungma in the region, Tenzing’s mother tells him it is inauspicious to even dream about such a thing. Even as he tries to wish it away, it’s a desire he gradually becomes obsessive about. Without today’s technology, where one has the impeccably precise weather forecast, wind speeds etc, climbing then was as much about tenacity, as it was about strategy. The groups had to follow a strict schedule, catching the right window to ascend to the peak, where even the warmest days are below freezing point, oxygen levels are a third of what they’re at sea-level, and wind speeds can average around 100-150 km/hr.A scene from Jennifer Peedom’s ‘Tenzing’. Photo: Screengrab from Youtube video/Apple TV.Peedom’s film could have gone wrong in many ways, like most foreign films set in Asia, telling the story of a culture they’re probably not well-versed in. However, Peedom seems sufficiently aware and respectful of the Sherpa culture, after having directed two documentary features in the region. The way she observes the racial dynamics between the Sherpas and the climbing team comprising primarily white men from England and New Zealand is splendid. In a minor bristle, Ed Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) tells Tenzing (Genden Phuntsok) how they were all there because of Mallory. “I’ve always been here,” Tenzing politely reminds him.I liked the similarity Peedom draws between Ed Hillary and Tenzing, both insider-outsiders with their respective ‘clans’. Hillary has to tolerate the curt, patronising tone of the Brits, for hailing from New Zealand. He never quite responds to it, however, one can see him digest it to fuel his resolve. Similarly, Tenzing is a Bhotiya (hailing from Tibet), and doesn’t belong to the sherpa tribe.Therefore, he too, is at the receiving end of some hostility, even more so when he demonstrates higher ability than local sherpas. When he’s enlisted as a full-time climbing member of the team, along with his duty as the head sherpa, he has to maintain a delicate balance between not alienating the climbing team and the sherpas, who did most of the physical labour of carrying heavy load of supplies for the climbing team, so they can make the conquest. The screenplay intersperses the climbing mission taking place in the present in 1953, along with a younger Tenzing (Tenzin Dalha) from around two decades before. Working as a daily labourer on a farm in Nepal, he’s spurred towards his mountaineering dreams by Dawa (Thinley Lhamo), the girl he’s in love with. Dalha, who has acted in many Hindi films, brings a rakish charm to these scenes – grounding the emotional stakes for Tenzing’s eventual climb. A stereotypical scene about a young Tenzing mispronouncing an English sentence being mined for laughs, becomes sweet here because of the earnestness with which Dalha performs it. Genden Phuntsok in a scene in ‘Tenzing’. Photo: Screengrab from Youtube video/Apple TV.I also enjoyed Willem Dafoe’s performance as James Hunt, a retired army man anointed as the leader of the British expedition. It’s a delicate performance, where Hunt is every bit a patronising Englishman, whose ego needs to be “managed” by Tenzing during many stages of the climb. He’s biased towards British climbers (working against Ed Hillary and Tenzing), but he’s also not an obstinate leader – embracing risk after hitting a seemingly insurmountable problem near the summit. Once the peak has been conquered, we see a humbled Hunt seated near the group, emotional about what his crew has been able to achieve. Tenzing is shouldered by the restrained performances of Phuntsok and Hiddleston, who are as gracious towards each other as determined in their individual ambitions. I enjoyed the Eastern mysticism not sounding hokey in a film made by a Western crew. The film thereby condenses the climbing philosophy of the sherpas, where Goddess Chomolungma is a mother-figure, who looks after the mountaineers doing it for the right reasons. It’s an emotional logic, more than a rational one, but one I found believable within the film. Just like in First Man, even in Peedom’s film, Tenzing takes along a souvenir to the summit. Once the duo climb down, the group’s regimented social divisions disappear, with Englishmen and sherpas hugging each other, singing and celebrating together. In 1921, ahead of his first climb, Mallory was asked why he wished to scale Everest. He very matter-of-factly said, “… because it is there.” Seeing the fulfilment in the film’s climax, which redefined the limits of human ability, I’d argue the reason was less dour.Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV.