The sweeping Italian drama The Eight Mountains is a mesmerizing exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery. Pietro is the 11-year-old son of a successful engineer in bustling, industrial Turin. When his parents rent a summer apartment in a tiny village high in the Italian Alps, he meets the only local child, Bruno, also an 11-year-boy. The two become inseparable and forge the profound, lifelong bond that can only come from a friendship you are lucky enough to make in childhood.
Each summer, the two cavort together in the mountains. Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi), a force nature, revels in climbing the local mountains and brings the boys along, not afraid to challenge them with a treacherous cliff or a bottomless abyss.
In contrast to Pietro’s, Bruno ‘s family shows him neither warmth nor affection, and values him only for his manual labor. Pietro’s parents generously offer to take in the teenage Bruno so he can realize his potential, but Bruno’s ignorant and selfish father nixes the arrangement.
There’s a pause in their relationship as each man grows as a man. A family event draws Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) and Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) back together as adults. Bruno is committed to living in his mountains. Pietro has been drifting, an undisciplined wannabe writer, but he, too, is drawn to the mountains where he spent the best days of his youth with Bruno. As Neil Young sang, “All my changes were there”. Both men are sons of Pietro’s father, one literally, and both chase the father’s dream in their individualistic ways.
The Eight Mountains is a remarkably genuine portrait of a masculine friendship, between boys and then between men. It captures the way such a friendship can resume instantly after a years-long pause. And it authentically depicts how male friends can communicate without verbalizing.
This story of two men’s individual growth and common friendship over 30 years, an intimate and tightly focused human story, is juxtaposed against an epic setting. The scenes of mountaineering in the Italian Alps are stunning enough, and then part of the story moves to the Nepali Himalayas.
Directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch adapted the screenplay from a novel by Paolo Cognetti. I am getting very grumpy about movies that are too long, and I was skeptical of The Eight Mountains’ 2 1/2 hour duration (even vowing beforehand to walk out if it became a slog). But the story really does take that long to unwind, and I’m glad that van Groeningen and Vandermeersch didn’t rush it.
The Eight Mountains is playing in select arthouse theaters. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely accessible.