First On The Rope
Release
19 Apr 1999Country
Language
FrenchProduction
Overview
Chamonix in the 1930s was a resort where a cosmopolitan, fashionable and sporting society thronged, in search of novelties and thrills found in mountaineering. These people rub shoulders with the Chamoniards but do not meet except on the trails of Mont-Blanc. The accident of Joseph, the patriarch of Servettaz, guides from generation to generation, marked the spirits. It is his son Zian who decides to take up the torch. Married to Bianca, the daughter of the wealthy Milanese industrialist who was partly responsible for her father's death, Zian lives out her great love story - a threesome - with the mountain always remaining the most demanding mistress. Tired of the agonizing expectations and loneliness during her husband's ascents, Bianca returns to Italy, Zian joins her, but society life is not his world, he returns to Chamonix. During an outing in the mountains, Zian falls into a crevasse. Bianca, alerted by a presentiment, returns to the one she loves above all...
Plot
This TV film, often shown in two episodes, is a screen adaptation of the well-known novel by Roger Frison-Roche about the harsh lives of mountain guides and their families in the French Alps, near Chamonix and the French/Swiss/Ita...
Cast
Ratings
Details
Director
Writers
Season 1
Episode 1
In the 1930s, the vogue for mountaineering brought to Savoie a cosmopolitan, worldly and athletic crowd eager to conquer the peaks. Jean Servettaz, a Chamonix guide, decided to prepare his son to become a hotelier to keep him away from the objective risks of the high mountains and to spare him the harsh existence of mountain dwellers. That didn't stop Pierre from training and being a fine climber. So he is one of the volunteers of the roped party who must lower the body of his father killed by lightning during a storm on his return from a race in the Drus. Snow and ice make the expedition almost impossible. For having wanted to force a passage anyway, Pierre falls. He will only get up from his hospital bed more determined not to sink into the life of a man of the plains, he will be a guide like his father. Bianca, the daughter of the rich Milanese responsible for the death of his father, comes see him in the hospital...
Episodes of Season 1
2 episodes
