Le otto montagne

This movie is beautiful. It's about life, childhood, living the life, death, existential crisis and friendship. It's a slow burner but never boring - on the contrary - you want to know the whole story about the two main characters and how they end up in life.

The scenery is stunning - from the alps to the Himalayas.

This is not pure entertainment- more like reading a book with pure wisdom and plenty of life experience. I suspect the story will stay with me for days or weeks. The acting is top notch.

However, this is the very opposite to the pure entertaining Hollywood movie, and is maybe not optimal for a Friday night after a long workweek.

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.

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

"The Eight Mountains" is a story about two young Italian boys spend their childhoods together in a secluded alpine village roaming the surrounding peaks and valleys before their paths diverge. Felix van Groeningen is a filmmaker I have seen previously and I haven't been too big with his works as his works were mainly a bit cheesy for my taste. This being a collaborated project with Charlotte Vandermeersch, this took a different shift.

The film has extremely beautiful camerawork, visual presentation, and sound designs as the film does a pretty good job showing the beautiful landscapes of Italy and the environment. The countryside presentation remained me of aspects from "Brokeback Mountain" or any films from Terrence Malick. The costumes and visual aspects of the film were the selling points of this film. With the characters explored, the film does explore themes of friendship, loss and social conflicts between society and while the film does have good moments, the themes felt a little dull as they felt unevenly explored. Many of the performances from the cast members were pretty good. Even the child actors were really good as well.

However, I wasn't able to fully connect with this film as I was hoping for. There are many great elements that could have been better like some of the characters relationships and conflicts could have been explored a little more and the pacing could have been improved as it did drag a little. Some dialogue moments were really bad. Overall, this isn't a bad film and there are a lot to appreciate, but it was a bit underwhelming since this was one of my anticipated films from Sundance.

Rating: B-

I was completely seduced from start to finish by the atmosphere, by the tenderness and the love that emerges from the fantastic story of this friendship.

The images are sublime and authentic. We can very well feel the influences of Sean Penn's "Into The Wild" in this film.

The music is also superb. I recommend to all movie buffs. For this me, this movie has it all.

The images of nature are breathtaking and remind us of the difficulties of living in the mountains. This film exudes authenticity and true relationships between humans.

The Italian actors are incredibly accurate.

It reminded me of the 70's.

I warmly recommend.

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.