The Eight Mountains

Directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch

Running time: 2hrs27 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi in The Eight Mountains

Friendship, as a subject, isn’t always well served by cinema. Filmmakers often seek in it the high-volume emotions and narrative peaks and troughs of grand romance, whereas many great friendships proceed at a slow, steady pace that isn’t nearly so easy to dramatise. The long-term male bond that shapes The Eight Mountains is quiet and consistent, with conflict that only occasionally rises above the surface; our protagonist and narrator Pietro (Luca Marinelli) admits it’s a relationship that endures without much maintenance from him or Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), his best friend from childhood. It’s simply there until it isn’t, and Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s slowly heart-crushing film tracks it with a perceptive patience that defies many a screenwriting manual and holds us rapt anyway, across a hilly hike of a running time.

Turin native Pietro and Alpine mountain lad Bruno meet as boys on the latter’s home turf, their initial fascination with each other’s urban and rural backgrounds deepening into a friendship that extends past a summer holiday. As Pietro visits Bruno repeatedly over the years, the pair become each other’s anchors in life, rooted in the spectacular slopes that one of them knows as home, and the other as an escape — a difference that defines both their connection and the friction between them, as restless Pietro’s world becomes larger in adulthood, while Bruno sticks with all he’s ever known. Still, they understand each other with a tacit intimacy that otherwise eludes both men through their other dealings in life.

The Eight Mountains goes heavy on visual metaphors (mountains, valleys, changeable weather and solid houses, built and rebuilt from the ground up) that nonetheless feel appropriate in marking the closeness between two men loath to talk about what binds them. The directors — who previously collaborated on the wrenching adult melodrama of The Broken Circle Breakdown, before Van Groeningen missed the mark with his overwrought US debut Beautiful Boy — are otherwise wary of overdetermining a story both delicate and muscular, filming it with a stoic classical elegance echoed in Marinelli and Borghi’s reserved but piercing performances. Over time, however, this combined restraint builds to a devastating torrent of feeling, like tears held back and back and back and then no more; an ode to loves taken for granted in life, it makes a case for renewing and reviving our oldest alliances.

THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (LE OTTO MONTAGNE) (2022) Written by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch | Shot by Ruben Impens | Edited by Nico Leunen

Now in UK cinemas