If someone were to tell you the life story of Lhakpa Sherpa — an unassuming-looking woman from Nepal who achieved greatness through sheer grit — your immediate reaction would be to assume that they are lying. Or that they are Sanjay Leela Bhansali in disguise, trying to pitch you a new movie. Her tale is recounted in Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, a Netflix documentary that doesn’t shame you for being unaware of her achievements but devotes itself to spreading the word about them in the most stunningly sentimental manner imaginable.
Mountain Queen is directed by the Oscar nominee Lucy Walker, who has always shown a fascination for stories about human accomplishment in the face of great odds. Lhakpa’s tale is one of uncommon tragedy and even rarer triumph. Born in a mountain village so remote that her entire community mistook the first white person they laid eyes on for a yeti, Lhakpa was denied an education because she was born a girl. She would carry her younger brother to school across harsh mountain terrain — the round trip took four hours every day — but was forbidden from getting an education herself. “I’m a very good yellow bus,” she says with a cheeky smile and a hint of pride.
The movie follows Lhakpa on her latest expedition to Mount Everest, which she insists is the most consequential one she has ever attempted. If she succeeds, she says, she will finally be able to provide a better life for her two teenage daughters, who make memorable appearances in the film. A single mother who works as a dishwasher at the supermarket — she lives in Connecticut, having essentially been trafficked there several years ago — Lhakpa harbours several secrets. She happens to be a widely decorated mountain climber with numerous records to her name, but that’s not all; Lhakpa’s extraordinary accomplishments have been masked by a life of brutal, often cruel hardship.
She narrates much of her story herself. Lhakpa had a son out of wedlock, was made an outcast by her people, and was sentenced to work as a house cleaner in the city. She wasn’t paid, but given enough food to support her child. Despite her difficulties, she dreamt of becoming a climber one day, inspired by the story of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first woman to summit Everest. Some years into her banishment, Lhakpa came across a kind man with connections and was introduced to the Prime Minister of Nepal, who agreed to fund her first expedition. Lhakpa summited Everest and became a national hero. You’d imagine — and rightly so — that this is her full story, but it isn’t; in fact, it’s merely the prologue.
What follows is a tale told with tremendous empathy, tact, and tenacity to rival that of its subject. It is framed around Lhakpa’s latest climb, filmed in a suitably thrilling manner, interspersed with vivid flashbacks of everything that she has overcome in the past decades. She approaches Everest with the reverence of a pilgrim marching towards a place of worship. She seeks permission before the climb and apologises to the great mountain before stepping on it. She feels like a nobody in real life, she says, but when Lhakpa Sherpa climbs, she becomes one with the mountain — fearsome and fabulous in equal measure.
Mountain Queen presents Lhakpa as nothing less than superhuman, but rather astutely, highlights just how ordinary she is. The filmmaking, on the other hand, is deceptively plain, like Lhakpa herself. You probably wouldn’t give her a second glance if you were to pass her on the street, or if you were to ask her for assistance at the supermarket where she works. You wouldn’t know what she has been through, the abuse that she has survived, the resilience that she has shown in raising her two daughters — an illiterate woman knocked down by life at every turn. Even the briefest detours of her life deserve a movie of their own. So epic is this narrative that Walker completely erases the equally remarkable story of a person who influenced Lhakpa’s life in pivotal ways.
She is perhaps the only person on the planet who can summit Everest a hundred times, and this still wouldn’t be her biggest achievement. No amount of pain that she suffers while scaling its icy peaks can compare to the horror she experienced in what was ostensibly her home. Mountain Queen is a grand achievement in documentary filmmaking; a crowd-pleaser of the topmost order that is terrifying, rewarding, and ultimately inspiring.
