The Eight Mountains
I’ve always found something liberating about movies that take place in the mountains. For someone who gets vertigo from looking over the second-floor railing at the mall, I can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy for those capable of trekking up the side of a giant rock and looking out over what feels like the entire world below. Even movie and TV heights give me anxiety — albeit not to the point of having to lie down to control my spinning head.
(Interestingly, James Stewart’s famous glimpses down the church tower staircase in Vertigo don’t make me reel, but they are a damned accurate visual representation of what it actually feels like to suffer from the sensation.)
With this sentiment in mind, married Belgian filmmakers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains offers some spectacularly dizzying landscapes, but this is far from a movie simply about grand vistas and panoramic scenery. Its Italian Alps setting may serve as the backbone to its complicated narrative, but it’s the characters that drive the story, not the other way around. Mountain life indeed motivates its players, but, as we come to learn, the bond between fathers and sons (or lack thereof), as well as the one between friends as close as brothers, is its true driving force.
In the summer of 1984, 12-year-olds Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) and Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) are an inseparable pair. Pietro is a city kid visiting a decaying Alpine village for the season where Bruno is the only other child. Both boys have strained relationships with their fathers — Pietro’s is a workaholic, while Bruno’s has all but abandoned him.
After a time, just as a connection between Pietro and his father Giovanni (Filippo Timi) begins to blossom over their shared interest in science and hiking, the more affluent family offers to take Bruno in so that he may attend school in the city. In response, Bruno’s father takes the boy away from the village to work with him as a journeyman bricklayer. It will be years before the friends see each other again.
Circumstances finally bring the two childhood friends back together as adults (played by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi), and they set out to rebuild a ruined mountain homestead left to Pietro by his late father. As the two men reconnect, their worlds are in a constant state of flux that mirrors the temperamental Alpine seasons, but while they bond, they come to understand each other and the fathers they spent so many years at odds with.
At nearly three hours, this oversimplification somewhat betrays the complexity of the plot, but The Eight Mountains remains rich in emotion and packed with composed drama. And while not exactly profound in its revelations, the vastness of its story is nevertheless compelling in the same way you may find a Steinbeck or Hemingway novel — minus the bullfighting machismo.
Honest explorations of male friendships that don't involve toxic levels of masculinity or virility are a welcome change from the hardened stoicism we’re so often fed by our franchised heroes and loner tough guys. Seeing two men come to terms with themselves and their decisions without resorting to banal gender-based antics is a corner I’d really like to see more films turn, even if it means "emasculating" our movie stars or some such alt-right nonsense.
Where some viewers may see the film’s occasionally languid pace and overall runtime as negatives, I find its purposefully unhurried rhythm perfect for moments of contemplation between scenes. (But then again, I can sit through five hours of Fanny and Alexander and turn around and do it all over again.) The Eight Mountains is all about reflection, cyclical journeys, discovery, and rediscovery. Hurrying it along without offering an audience a moment to absorb its meaning, filter it through their own experiences, and process the results would result in a movie resembling a thin, pale mush. Thankfully, we’re given thoughtful depth and substance instead.
Grade: B. Not rated. Now playing at Grail Moviehouse
(Photo: Janus Films)
