147 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Two boys meet in a dying Alpine village and spend the next thirty years circling each other. One leaves the mountains. One stays. The film is about which choice is the lie.
Pietro is a city boy from Turin whose parents drag him to a remote Aosta Valley hamlet every summer. Bruno is the last child living in that village, a cowherd who has never seen anything else. The two become friends across a divide of class and geography that never fully closes. The Eight Mountains tracks their bond from boyhood into middle age as Pietro travels to Nepal and Bruno stays to rebuild a stone house his friend’s dead father left unfinished. The film is about the two ways a man can live with the same patch of earth. One man flees it to find himself. The other plants himself in it and refuses to move.
Luca Marinelli plays the adult Pietro as a man perpetually arriving and leaving. He carries the restlessness of someone who confuses motion with growth. Alessandro Borghi plays Bruno with a rooted stillness that becomes its own kind of stubbornness. Borghi lets you see the mountain man harden into a person who cannot adapt when the world stops needing him. Filippo Timi plays Pietro’s father Giovanni as a difficult man whose love arrives only through maps and walking trails. The boyhood passages with Lupo Barbiero and Cristiano Sassella establish a wordless intimacy that the adult actors then have to honor.
Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch direct from their own adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s novel. They shoot the Alps in the boxy Academy ratio, and the choice does the opposite of what you expect. The narrow frame walls the men inside the landscape instead of letting the peaks sprawl. The mountains press in on the edges rather than opening up. The directors stretch time deliberately, letting a stone wall get built brick by brick and a season turn before they cut. The patience is the argument. You earn the friendship by sitting inside its long silences.
This is a film about the lie that you can outrun where you come from. Pietro spends decades convinced that distance is the same as freedom. Bruno spends them convinced that staying is the same as faith. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch refuse to crown either man right, because the point is that both choices cost everything. The eight mountains of the title come from a Nepalese parable about who travels farther, the man who walks all eight or the man who climbs the one at the center. The film leaves the riddle open and trusts you to feel why it cannot be solved.