The Eight Mountains (2022)
The Eight Mountains by Belgian filmmakers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch is the beautiful but ultimately not completely satisfying film adaptation of the novel Le Otto Montagne by Paolo Cognetti.
Friendship is key in this Belgian-Italian co-production, which was selected for the Golden Palm Competition in Cannes.
We get to know Bruno and Pietro when they are young, in the summer of 1984, when Pietro’s middle class parents spend their holiday in the small Alpine village, where Bruno lives.
Although the big city kid and the country boy are polar opposites, they strike up a friendship, which they continue the following summer.
Well, until Pietro's father - a chemist - offer to send Bruno - son of a stonemason - to school in Turin. Bruno's dad, however, wants his son to also work in construction and breaks off all contact.
As adults, they resume their friendship. Pietro (Luca Marinelli) has become estranged from his father. When the man dies, he leaves his son a heap of stones in the Alps, which he and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) decide to turn into a new home.
While doing this, it is revealed that over the years Bruno kept in touch with Pietro’s father. That they took the trips through the mountains together, which Pietro’s father could no longer take with his own son.
The revelation of this alternative father-son relationship does not lead to a conflict between the two friends. Which proves the strength of their friendship. But for two-and-half-hours almost nothing in the movie leads to real drama.
That's kind of the problem with The Eight Mountains. The movie is full of beautiful landscape imagery and at times the men really open up about their feelings. But the story contains little narrative drive, with the sad songs on the soundtrack doing much of the emotional heavy lifting.
Sometimes Pietro and Bruno spend a lot of time together, other years they don't see very much of each other. Which is how friendships work. But they remain episodes that are glued together one after the other without any real tension.
Undoubtedly a conscious decision by the filmmakers, to let the story more or less speak for itself. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch were so committed to the project that they learned to speak Italian, and all the Italian actors in the film deliver fine work.
But Van Groeningen's most famous movie, The Broken Circle Breakdown, (which he co-wrote with his life partner Vandermeersch) was full of explosive drama, interspersed with sentimental passages, which made the movie come alive in breathtaking fashion.
In The Eight Mountains the melancholy is palpable throughout, but the film, for all its unmistakable charms, does not run quite as deep.