Attending a ski movie screening can feel like deja vu. You arrive at a theater and the parking is lousy with Subarus sporting gear boxes. You go in, get free energy bars, buy a t-shirt and raffle tickets, wait in the dark with hundreds of fellow skiers, and finally watch some ski porn that is basically identical to the one you saw last year. But this fall, Salt Lake City was host to “Solitaire,” a ski film from Sweetgrass Productions that is unique, beautiful, and unlike anything skiers have ever seen.
“Solitaire” is the third film from Sweetgrass Productions, and it takes place entirely in the mountains of South America. The cameras follow a group of backcountry skiers (some of them locals from here in Salt Lake) as they travel under their own power into the most remote peaks of Argentina’s Las Lenas, Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, and Chilean Patagonia.
But the movie isn’t about the skiers. There aren’t any athlete interviews telling us how sick it is to ski there. In fact, you never know who’s skiing as names aren’t even superimposed on screen. Instead, “Solitaire” focuses on the journey, and they do it through Spanish narration with English subtitles of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a 1902 novella about a traveler’s journey into the unexplored African jungles of the Congo River. Imagine ski porn with subtitles that you have to read! This is a bold move for a genre that generally caters to energy drinking ski punks with short attention spans. Instead, (and lucky for us) we get a film that’s largely symbolic and cerebral, and that’s refreshing to see.
Also refreshing is to see each skier’s journey into the unknown as they travel from rain-saturated jungles or the endless white canvas of desolate salt flats, slowly making their way upward into the snow. Roughly half of the film isn’t even shots of skiing, but gloriously crafted images of rippled water, blowing dust backlit by the sun, a crumbling hut among boiling hot springs, and skiers walking, climbing, and eventually skiing through this dramatic scenery. And when these anonymous skiers do make turns, what you see is real. The film doesn’t show just the best powder or most awesome cliffs the filmmakers could find. In fact, much of the skiing is done on ice, frozen death-cookies, and rock strewn flats. Each location is shown as they found it, and is presented with honesty and reality.
This isn’t the first time Sweetgrass has attempted a new way of making ski films. With their previous efforts, “Hand Cut” and “Signatures,” they showed the world that a ski movie can be more than just a smattering of gnarly-dude ski videos featuring hucksters and goofballs mugging at the camera in individual athlete segments. Sweetgrass gives us ski movies with themes, narrative, and cinematography beautiful enough to hang on the wall of the Louvre. With “Solitaire,” we get all of that too. But this time, the gang at Sweetgrass has elevated ski movies to an art form.
Nobody has ever made a ski film quite like this. “Solitaire” is easily the most cinematic ski movie I have ever seen. Nick Waggoner and the crew at Sweetgrass have proven they are masters of their craft. Now that they’ve completed their masterpiece (yes, I said it) I wonder what’s next for them. How can they possibly improve on what they have already done? I’m sure they’ll find a way, and I will be first in line to witness the next step in the evolution of ski movies with soul.