The Eight Mountains: Brotherly Love at High Altitude, Presented as Intimate Epic
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Fictional accounts of women’s lifelong friendships are relatively commonplace, from the literary highs of Elena Ferrente’s My Brilliant Friend, to the Netflix series, Firefly Lane. But stories of men’s friendships that don’t involve sports, war or spaceships, are harder to find.
The Eight Mountains, Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s adaptation of the award-winning 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti, is an exception, a tender story of a lifelong male friendship.
The film, which won which a jury prize at Cannes last year and the David di Donatello prize as Italy’s best picture of 2022, follows the relationship between Pietro and Bruno, who are spiritual brothers, though unrelated by blood.
Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) and Pietro (Luca Marinelli) have an elevated conversation about life.
We first meet Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) the narrator of the film, as an almost 12-year-old from the city on a family vacation to Aosta Valley in northwest Italy. His father, Giuseppe (Filippo Timi) is a factory manager who’s fanatical about mountaineering.
The family meets Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), a tough country kid of Pietro’s age, who is the only child in the tiny village. Bruno lives on a farm with his uncle and aunt while his father works on construction jobs in Austria or Switzerland.
Van Groeningen directed the emotional 2012 Belgian bluegrass drama The Broken Circle Breakdown and the English-language Timothée Chalamet addiction film, Beautiful Boy. Here, he teams with his actress partner Vandermeersh to adapt Cognetti’s novel, using extensive use of voice-over from the film’s source.
Visually, the filmmakers employ the old-fashioned squarish Academy ratio, emphasizing the vertical dimension of the mountain setting: The effect is to remind us that mountains aren’t just vistas to admire, but also enclosing walls to scale.
The two kids climb and scamper and wrestle and explore together over the magical landscape. But their new friendship is spoiled by adult interference when Pietro’s father and schoolteacher mom (Elena Lietti), propose taking Bruno back to Turin with them and put him in school with Pietro.
In reaction to this interference, Bruno’s father takes Bruno away with him to work on a construction project.
Pietro is bitterly resentful of his father’s interference, and he clings to that grudge well into his adulthood (when he is played by Luca Marinelli, star of 2019’s Martin Eden).
In defiance of his father, he refuses to pursue an educated profession, preferring to make a living as a restaurant worker. Years later, when his father suddenly dies while on holiday in the mountains, Pietro returns to the mountain village and his grieving mother.
Pietro is surprised to discover Giuseppe had become a surrogate figure to Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), helping him out financially and sharing mountain climbs.
But whatever jealousy Pietro feels at having been supplanted as the object of his father’s affection, he gets over quickly. He and Pietro meet, compare beards, and fall into an easy companionship again. Bruno tells Pietro that the father had been constructing a small stone hut high up a mountain slope, and he proposes that the two men complete the building together as a tribute to Giovanni and to use as a shared summer getaway spot.
The summer after the hut is finished, Pietro brings some of his city friends to visit the shelter. Later, Pietro’s casual girlfriend (Elisabetta Mazzullo) returns on her own, taking up a life with Bruno, having a daughter and helping run a farm and cheese-selling business.
Pietro, still rootless, decides to go to Nepal, like Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, seeking an Eastern philosophy to find transcendent meaning in his life. He manages to publish a successful book about his experience and finally achieve a purpose to his life.
The film’s title comes from the Buddhist cosmology, described in an anecdote that Pietro shares with Bruno while they get drunk on grappa: They debate about who “wins” - the man like Bruno who ascends and stays on one high mountain, or the man like Pietro, who travels and sees many places.
Ultimately, the film suggests unhappiness is dealt out evenly, but in different packages: Bruno’s farm begins to fail and debtors press in. The threat is real, but, devoted to his mountain heritage, he’s too stubborn to adapt.
Pietro, who admires the integrity of his spiritual brother but has the cushion of his education to fall back on, wants to help, but is harshly rebuffed. The men’s stereotypical inability to talk about their emotions, aggravates their isolation.
At just under two-and-a-half hours and spanning three decades, The Eight Mountains feels thorough, as well as sensitively acted and moving. Its weakness is a tendency toward grandiosity, treating an anecdotal drama as though it were an epic. The soundtrack of English-language folk songs from Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren punches home the mood of tortured regret. Viewers can rarely stop staring at those set-design-by-God mountain backdrops, which could sacralize even the most conventional of human stories.
The Eight Mountains. Written and directed by Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch, based on the novel by Paolo Cognetti. Stars Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Filippo Timi, Elena Lietti, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Cristiano Sassella, Lupo Barbiero. Opens Friday, May 19, in Toronto (Cineplex Scotiabank), Montreal (Cinemathéque Quebecois, Cinema du Parc, Cinema Beaubien); Vanocuver (Vancity), VIctoria (The VIc), Ottawa (Bytowne Cinema), Hamilton (Playhouse Cinema) Edmonton (Metro Cinema) Sudbury (Indie Cinema) and Waterloo (Princess Cinema).