The Eight Mountains [Le Otto Montagne] **** (2022, Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi) – Classic Movie Review 12,489

The beautiful and rather magical 2022 Italian drama film The Eight Mountains [Le Otto Montagne] tells the epic story of friendship and self-discovery between Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), set in the breathtaking Italian Alps.

Luca Marinelli stars in the lovely, beautiful and rather magical 2022 Italian drama film The Eight Mountains [Le Otto Montagne] as the grown-up Pietro, who as a boy from Turin goes on holiday with his parents with his family to the mountain countryside, and meets his best friend Bruno, the last child remaining in a forgotten and largely abandoned remote Alpine mountain village in the Val D’Aosta.

He is besotted at once, and they are instant best friends. Bruno is of similar age but has to work on the family farm already. Pietro’s dad gets the boy climbing, getting Bruno to join them, and encourages the boys’ friendship. Pietro becomes a snotty teenager and falls out with his good-hearted dad.

Pietro goes on to study, not knowing what life to choose, while Bruno is pushed into construction work by his father. Bruno ‘s dad is often absent and none too nice. Both men have father issues apparently. Pietro’s dad befriends Bruno.

After a long gap, years later, the duo meet up again and reconnect after Pietro’s dad dies, leaving him a collapsed shelter in the mountains near their old holiday retreat. Their friendship rekindles instantly, and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) gets Pietro to join him in fulfilling the promise he made to his long-estranged father of restoring a destroyed mountain home, a four-month task. Cue impressive house restoration that Grand Designs would love. Later, Bruno remains faithful to his mountain home, living there increasingly precariously, while the restless Pietro comes and goes. But, over the years, the two discover what it means to be true friends for life, their true fate.

This brilliant, haunting epic story is all about mountains and friendship, with two handsome bearded men and the most beautiful landscapes to make it work. All the way through you expect the men to get it together, maybe by the crackling fire like Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love, but there is no physical gay thing between them. Both men have long-term relationships with women, Bruno in the mountains, Pietro on his wanderings in Nepal (Surakshya Panta as Asmi). But it’s pretty obviously a case of bros first.

What affects you in childhood stays with you for life, apparently, and Bruno and Pietro never get beyond their 12-year-old selves. This is clearly a good thing and a bad thing, but the movie really makes a case for it as a real and true thing. The two men are unfulfilled for ever, but somehow in a good way. The film and the actors have the courage of their convictions.

It looks like a hard, challenging shoot, and everybody goes full out for it. It was certainly a long, complex shoot, filmed in the Italian Alps, Turin and Nepal over seven months, beginning in the summer of 2021.

Bruno and Pietro are splendidly menly men, in some ways perfect models, so this bitter-sweet story is kind of disturbing as fulfilment and happiness for them are missing, finally remaining utterly elusive. Eventually, only the memory of a lifetime of struggle, the battle for survival, and search for purpose and identity remains, along with the undying friendship and the mountains of course. The actual happy time, of course, was when they were boys.

It’s a lovely looking film, lovingly shot by Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens, and as exciting emotionally as it is visually. Haunting and intangible, it is a bit of a triumph, actually.

The Eight Mountains is co-directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, who co-adapt the screenplay from the novel of the same name by Paolo Cognetti.

It is epic in sweel and scale, running 147 minutes.

The film premiered in competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2022, where it won the Jury Prize in a tie with EO.

The cast are Luca Marinelli as Pietro, Alessandro Borghi as Bruno, Lupo Barbiero as young Pietro, Andrea Palma as adolescent Pietro, Cristiano Sassella as young Bruno, Francesco Palombelli as adolescent Bruno, Filippo Timi as Giovanni, Elena Lietti as Francesca, Elisabetta Mazzullo as Lara, and Surakshya Panta as Asmi.

Italian actor Luca Marinelli.

Marinelli also acted as a gay man in another Italian movie There Is a Light [Il padre d’Italia] and also stars in Martin Eden.

Luca Marinelli (born 22 October 1984) is best known for Every Blessed Day (2012), The Great Beauty (2013), Don’t Be Bad (2015), They Call Me Jeeg (2016), Il padre d’Italia (2017), Martin Eden (2019), The Old Guard (2020), Diabolik (2021) and The Eight Mountains (2022).

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,489

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