Adapted from the novel of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains touches on themes of class division, memory and regret, and people’s relationship to the land across its nearly two-and-a-half hours. It’s a vision of the Empyrean that sneaks up on you, proving to be more than the sum of its disparate, photogenic parts. This is a beautiful and provocative story about a profoundly rooted friendship, and one that’s obsessed with the consequences of living freely and asking us to consider that which we leave behind in the pursuit of personal enlightenment.
Taking place over three decades, the film charts the ups and downs of the friendship between Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi). Sparingly narrated by Pietro, The Eight Mountains reveals Bruno (played as a child by Cristiano Sassella) to the audience almost as if he were a mythological object, the only child in the fading Italian village of Grana near the Alps. Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) and his mother (Elena Lietti) are there on vacation and the two quickly become friends, exploring nearly every inch of the area’s verdant landscapes.
The Eight Mountains often turns to metaphor, but in ways that match the mostly quiet constitutions of its main characters. This is a film that emphasizes the centrality of the natural world in people’s lives, and so it’s perhaps inevitable that frequent mention is made of laying down roots. At one point, Bruno begins to call his new friend Berio (meaning rock in the local dialect), though it will be Bruno who will reveal himself to be the most stubborn of the two. In one spine-tingling sequence, Pietro’s father, Giovanni (Filippo Timi), takes the boys on a hike up a mountain, and the fissure in the glacier that ultimately divides the man from his son feels nothing short like the catalyst for the emotional rift that will destroy their relationship.
As the kids grow closer, Pietro’s parents make the good-natured but ultimately consequential error of pushing Bruno’s uncle (Gualtiero Burzi) to allow them to take the boy to Turin with them for a proper education. While Bruno seems to want to go, Pietro tries to convince his own parents that this friend should stay in Grana. Such is the film’s sense of ambiguity on the micro level that it isn’t completely clear if Pietro is truly concerned with compromising his friend’s connection to the earth, or if he’s selfishly trying to calcify an image of Grana as wholly separate from his non-vacation life. Ultimately, it’s Bruno’s father (Alex Sassella) that prevents the move, pushing his son into construction work and effectively separating the friends for 15 years.
That separation constitutes an inciting incident of sorts, and it comes to haunt The Eight Mountains in the quietest of ways. Giovanni will eventually die, after many years of not speaking to his son, who will discover that his father not only left him a plot of land on one of Grana’s surrounding mountains, but that his old man and Bruno grew close over the years. When Pietro agrees to help Bruno rebuild the hut that crumbles away on this inherited land across the summer, they silently put themselves on a path toward remembrance. Then, as Pietro sets off to walk the trails that his father Bruno did over the years, the film knocks you out with the revelation that Pietro’s agreement is also a mighty step toward atonement.
While Bruno speaks of destiny and the inevitability of staying loyal to the land, Pietro wonders if climbing the world’s peaks is better than climbing the largest one in his own backyard. Though the film relies at times on melancholy songs with obvious lyrics to underscore its points—about people’s connections to place, the privilege of choice when it comes to the world opening itself to us—its lyrical images by and large speak for themselves. Rich in novelistic detail and lucid in its realism, the film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.
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