Las ocho montañas

There are certain movies in modern cinema that have an abstract length and tempo. They're often hard to describe and sometimes even tougher to sit through. At the same time, they work somewhat like a time travel machine. Suddenly, everything stops and life flashes before your eyes. Before you even realize it, you're contemplating the sense of your life and are forced to evaluate the decisions you made and the person you've become. You either love it or you hate it.

In 2021, Drive My Car by Ryusuke Hamaguchi was a pitch-perfect example of such cinema. Now, it's almost impossible not to feel similarly about The Eight Mountains by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.

The film follows a simple yet complex story of Pietro, who visits an almost abandoned mountain village as a child with his mother during summer. There, he meets Bruno, a boy his age who's one of the 14 citizens who have stayed following an "industrial revolution." Their lives vary on every possible level.

Pietro is a city-raised boy, with all the flashy clothes and fancy Adidas on his feet, while Bruno wears the same dirty bags and has to take care of cattle. The former is successful in school, while the second struggles to read. Yet, they form a connection that, to much of their surprise, would hold them together until the end of their lives.

At first sight, The Eight Mountains feels like an ordinary story of friendship that was lost in time, yet marks its return in an unexpected fashion as both Bruno and Pietro (now adults) find themselves building a house together. A house, that was a dream of Pietro's father, who doesn't really have a significant relationship with his son but has found an oddly, though, understandably, strong bond with Bruno instead.

The friendship between Pietro and Bruno is a feat so incredibly acted and written, with its subtlety telling us more emotions than any words could have, that it's definitely a perfect choice to have it as a main story. What does true friendship mean? And how much can it take? Does it have boundaries, and if so, can they ever be crossed? You'll find answers to these questions here. But The Eight Mountains is much more than that.

It's a tale about stepping out of your parents' shadow, yet struggling to cut away the same (often toxic) habits they had. It's about searching for your own purpose, while also trying to fulfill your parents' wishes and dreams. It's about looking for your own place in the world in light of always being the second choice among the people you know, but still coming back and finding happiness and solace with them. It's about crossing your own limits in your head but failing plenty of times along the way.

The list of themes in The Eight Mountains is definitely a lengthy one. Such cases are often a recipe for messy productions that struggle to keep viewers' attention. This time around, it's also not perfect. There are moments when you start crying, only to wipe your tears and focus again on the short but important conversations, with dramatic, almost thriller-like music suddenly playing in the background. Then you're back to crying but also holding your breath.

Yes, The Eight Mountains can be sometimes hard to keep track of. With all its emotional themes and rhythmical rollercoaster, you will find yourself confused, just like I did. Still, it does an even better job of gluing you back into the screen, not only due to the story but the monumental views it shows.

The majority of the movie takes place somewhere in Italian Alps. While I've never personally seen this part of the world, I don't need any convincing anymore to do so. The film is shot masterfully, with the camera often zooming out and transforming the main characters into a small element of the background, while the astonishing mountains take the main stage.

There aren't many moments like these in The Eight Mountains, but when they strike, they do so with full force. With an inspiration surely taken from a movie like Into the Wild (2007), it feels somewhat familiar, but it doesn't take away the pleasure and with its unusual narrow camera angle, it's certainly special.

On top of that, these mountains, cliffs, edges, and so on aren't only there to take your breath away. They're a perfect metaphor for the story. "The mountain is a way of living life. One step in front of the other, silence, time and measure," says Bruno throughout the film.

The Eight Mountains is an incredibly ambitious project which tells numerous stories, all connected to each other. Pietro's journey to self-discovery is one that won't grab everyone's attention at first sight, but those who give it a try and have some patience will certainly be rewarded with a mix of emotions. Emotions, that take your heart by storm and won't let go.

You either love or hate this kind of cinema, and I unquestionably belong to the first group. After watching The Eight Mountains, you will love it as well.

Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch succeeded magnificently in bringing the epic tale of Paolo Cognetti about relationships between people and people and mountains to the big screen.

With Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi the main characters were brought alive by probably two of the biggest talents in acting Italy has to offer at the moment.

The mountain scenery is simply stunning and the stuff that every mountain enthusiast's dreams are made of. However, you want to keep your eyes wide open for this picture. Neither flashy nor slow, this movie takes the time to tell a story, without it getting tedious at any point. It gives you the space to take it all in and it allows one's emotions to come into their own.

These days, when the emphasis in so many independent films is (for completely understandable reasons of prior neglect) on the feelings and relationships of women, here is a film that strides unapologetically into unusual territory - the complex emotional ties of two straight men who (with sometimes lengthy absences) have been close friends since boyhood. This is not to be confused with banal bromance films, with their pat tropes and (in too many cases) their uneasy joking about (yuk!) gayness. This is about two guys who sincerely, deeply love each other, even as they seek out and experience sexual intimacy with women. Could it be that the subtlety with which their relationship is portrayed was made possible by the many fine woman-centric films we have seen of late and that explore similar themes? Whatever, because it avoids clichés and cheap high-emotion plot twists (there are so many sequences when I braced for these and then, blessedly, they don't come), the film is deeply moving, and this avoidance of the explicit and the obvious places it, for me at least, on a higher plane than other recent efforts that cover similar territory (the recent, and in its own way excellent, Belgian film "Close", for example, in which the sexual pull between two early-adolescent boys is more fully developed, or the comparatively overblown "Banshees of Inisherin", which hammers away at you with cheaper, plot-driven superficiality).

The story is made all the more powerful by its examination of the complex relationships of the two boys, and later young men, with their respective fathers, and particularly with the father of Pietro, the narrator, (masterfully played by Filippo Timi) who, we eventually understand, became a central influence in the lives of both. The father of Bruno, the other protagonist, remains an unseen, malign presence -- though he does seem to have appeared in earlier cuts, since IMDB lists a credit for him. (Though the film in its present form clocks in at 2h27min, one does get the sense that there's a lot that ended up on the cutting room floor, which possibly accounts for how the later Nepal-located episodes seem somewhat underdeveloped and undermotivated. I would love to see a director's cut - I imagine it would be even richer and more rewarding.)

The acting throughout is on the highest level, including in the roles of the two protagonists as boys and as grown men. Luca Marinelli, in particular, who plays Pietro as a young adult, gives a stunning, understated, totally credible and moving performance. (He bears a striking resemblance to the young Gael Garcia Bernal, although, on the evidence of this film, his gifts as an actor may be greater.) The majesty of the mountain scenery (in the alpine Aosta valley) is stunningly portrayed and acts a glue to the film, grounding it in a specific reality and binding the characters to each other.

The one false note (if you will pardon the pun) lies in the soundtrack, which unaccountably draws on the English-language bleatings of a Swedish singer/songwriter named Daniel Norgren, who makes great, and to my mind cheesy, use of the organ. When the latter swells up at key moments, some of the air gets sucked out of the film's emotions. In a film of such delicacy and acuteness of observation, these moments seem like intrusions. This is one of those films that doesn't need music to make its impact, and the directors should perhaps have had the courage to leave well enough alone, as demonstrated by a few, hugely powerful shots that occur in near-total silence. But, with something this fine overall, that is a quibble.

Felix Van Groeningen, the director of The Eight Mountains, was born and raised in an area that's as flat as a pancake. I know, because I live there. There are no mountains in Flanders.

Maybe it takes a flatlander like Van Groeningen to really appreciate the beauty of mountains. His film starts with magnificent images of the Italian Alps, the area where The Eight Mountains takes place. In fact, the whole movie seems to be an ode to the beauty of the mountains. The vistas from the highest summits and the calm of a mountain lake: the images are magnificent.

And so is the story of the two friends, who both love those mountains. As a child, city dweller Pietro befriends Bruno, who lives in a small mountain village. Their friendship continues when they are adults. The film shows how they both try to shape their lives, each in their own way. Both are drawn to the mountains, but in different ways.

Van Groeningen, together with his wife Charlotte Vandermeersch, has made a beautiful and poetic movie about the friendship between Bruno and Pietro. The two men don't show their emotions easily, and the film doesn't aim for easy effects either. In an understated, subtle way, the movie shows how their lives divert, but remain connected through their mutual love for the mountains. It's well directed, well acted and beautifully filmed. This film will find a natural audience: the readers of Paolo Cognetti's bestseller it's based on. But those who haven't read the book might also be fascinated by the friendship between Pietro and Bruno.

As children (during summer holidays in the Italian Alps) two young boys become acquainted, with a purity and innocence that's well painted, bonding as brothers in a way, having great fun the days they play, quite different backgrounds, but that affect, is far from tainted. As they get older their own journeys change direction, until one loses a father, then reconnection, and a project is established, to realise the one that's passed wish, and from the rubble and old wood, there's introspection. As time passes they move on to different glades, one travels, one a family does raise, but like the land with all those highs, there are some lows that can capsize, as life can be transformed, by where you graze.