Now Streaming on Criterion: 'The Eight Mountains' Is Manufactured for Maximum Middle-Aged Man Tears

By Jason Adams | Film | August 22, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | August 22, 2023 |

Are you good at making friends? It seems as if some people are born naturals at it, a skill I’ve always eyed with equal doses of awe and suspicion. Since childhood I’ve been a closed-off person—an only child, I proved early to be suited just fine to being left alone in my room, reading books, writing stories, and acting out soap operas among my He-Man action figures. As you get older you’re forced by circumstance to leave your room now and then, where inevitably relationships are formed. I can still count on two hands the number of people I’ve let genuinely sneak in past my defenses, but I guard those bonds with the messianic devotion of true religion. The thought of any friendship ended flips my stomach over.

The Eight Mountains, the spectacular new film from Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen (director of The Broken Circle Breakdown and Beautiful Boy), is about the fierce alliances between those who wrestle with that kind of isolationist temperament and introduces us straight off to an 11-year-old boy named Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) that I recognized immediately. Shy and attached to his mother’s hip, Pietro’s a city boy whose parents have taken a summer house in a village in the nearby Italian Alps. Once decently populated, the fictional town of Grana is now down to the double-digits, Pietro’s mother is told by a new neighbor—indeed there is only one other child in the entire town.

That’s the sort of circumstantial wedge that could pry open any shy boy’s defenses, and when Pietro first sees this other kid herding animals through the village he stares at him with immediate curiosity—how self-possessed this young man seems! Also 11-years-old, Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) is living with his aunt and uncle and working on their farm full-time; Bruno’s father has left to do bricklaying work elsewhere, and when asked about his mother he goes notably quiet. But despite their differences, before you know it the boys are inseparable. Having an idyllic summer together against the splendor of these natural surroundings—and if you’re a sucker for mountain scenery like I am then the way cinematographer Ruben Impens shoots this landscape will make your toes curl—the boys’ circumstances work like water and time to sand down their rougher edges.

There’s a lot in the first half of The Eight Mountains that brought to mind Close, Belgium’s Oscar-nominee last year from director Lukas Dhont—specifically the unspoken tension of those last moments of childhood innocence before the expectations of masculinity begin to sledgehammer their way through it. Pietro and Bruno, isolated away from any peers’ expectations, are left to be freely intimate, emotionally and physically. There’s no self-consciousness as they wrestle and swim together; in another place, under other conditions, we can see how this friendship might have withered. But instead we’re left to gape in wonder at the awesomeness of how forces, against such mighty head-winds, can sometimes land just right.

Until they don’t, of course. Such bubbles are built to burst. And as Pietro heads back and forth between this mountain oasis and his hometown of Turin for school every fall, and as the confusion of teenage sensations begin pouring down off the glacier-like rivers, cracks develop. These boys are, after all, coming from very different places.

But Vandermeersch and van Groeningen’s script, adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s best-selling 2016 novel, renders this teenage chasm as merely chapter-like—decades crumble in a matter of moments, and before you know it Pietro (now played by Martin Eden and The Old Guard actor Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) are bearded loners who reunite on that mountain-side after Pietro’s father has died. Pietro has taken to wandering, unsure of his place in the world; Bruno has stayed still, slightly too sure of his place being right where he is. But those differences keep circling back and landing them in the same spot.

It turns out in Pietro’s wandering his father went and bonded with Bruno; indeed Bruno was going to help him build a cabin there, and when he died Bruno decided to keep his wish. Pietro, thrown by his father’s death and their lack of resolution, decides to join Bruno then for another summer, in order to build this tribute to the father he’d abandoned. And the pure silent poetry of these passages, as the two men sit on top of the world and get to know each other once again, are among the most moving you’ll see on film this year.

Manufactured for maximum middle-aged man tears (hi, waving in middle-aged-man here), The Eight Mountains, glorious and perhaps perfect, contains the sweep of entire lives and loves as high as its alpine scenery set against the minutiae of small things we are never able to speak out loud. How we can seem like the smallest specks up against such grandeur; specks of dust spinning in a cosmos too vast? There is one drone shot late on, where the camera pulls back and back and back and back from this place we’ve become so profoundly attached to (just like its characters have) where we see how infinitesimal and isolated it is against the world. And wow.

Suddenly everything in our own lives and our own choices rushes forth. Cold winds whistle down its face. Freezing in stasis we find ourselves lost in indecision; is there only one set of true eyes to find us, to see us, through the storm? Is that how we built it to be? Where have our decisions led us? Our tracks get lost behind us; we find we’re suddenly there, on the other side of this enormous thing looking back. And we never even knew what the hell to grab onto. Especially if it was each other.