"The Eight Mountains" is a Great Movie of 2023
Buddy stories about two friends are a dime a dozen in world literature, going all the way back to “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”
And done well, they should always work because of timeless questions that deeply affect us all.
What, for example, is real friendship? And how does real friendship sustain itself over years and decades when the individuals in the friendship keep changing?
These questions and more have prompted great thinking and writing. Augustine’s Confessions comes to mind, as does Dante’s Comedy, a book surprisingly much more about friendship than about condemning sinners to hell.
I mention those two Italy-based works because the 2022-2023 movie ‘The Eight Mountains” reminds me of them to an extent. Here’s a true cinematic experience to treasure, centering on two Italian male friends and their decades’ long friendship.
Not always does the Cannes Jury award deserve it, but this one — which tied with another movie for the prize in 2022 — certainly does.
The movie is based on an award-winning Italian novel which I am now tempted to read. It’s directed by a pair of Belgiums, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch, who with just this one movie prove themselves to be at the height of movie-craftmanship.
And, fascinating to me, they are a partnership that works in an industry notorious for individualistic egos. Which means their real-world friendship — though they are also in an intimate relationship together — is probably reflected in this film’s fictional friends.
First, “The Eight Mountains” has majestic nature cinematography that never stops wowing. I am always impressed when fictional-film directors do much better than, say, BBC nature documentarians. That’s been true of Terence Malick and Werner Herzog, and now it’s true of van Groeningen and Vandermeesch.
Appropriately, “The Eight Mountains” stays mostly in the Italian Alps, though later in the film it will venture to a more dramatic mountain-locale: Tibet. It’s in the Alps, though, that the two Italian friends of Pietro and Bruno live out their lifetime friendship.
Early in the film, Bruno is surrogately adopted into Pietro’s family. Bruno’s father is a drunk, and so Pietro’s father takes to him quickly. The only problem — beginning a good tension that will last the entire film — is that Pietro is emotionally estranged from his father. He’s a bit of a rebel, yet his father gives more affection to Bruno than to his own biological son.
This is where I picked up on shades of the “Prodigal Son” story, which is wonderfully inverted later in the movie.
In this part of the movie, a key scene happens, reminding me of another classic, “Citizen Kane,” in which a man’s life is greatly determined by the things that happen to him as a boy. Pietro’s father takes the two boys up on a glacier, where they intend to hike to its peak, a feat I think is too ambitious for these little boys. With the father’s help, Bruno is able to jump a big gap in the glacier. But Pietro is unable to. This stops the ascent to the top.
Later in the movie, a story is told about the eight-mountain journey. It goes a little like this. One man may hike up the highest peak of all, yet surrounding that peak are eight other smaller ones, which another traveller may venture around. The central peak is the highest and toughest, meant for very few. The traverse around peak, to the eight peaks encircling it, is for wanderers like the prodigal son himself.
The story has to do with the nature of men: who will be a great lone climber and who will be a wider traveller to a variety of locales? Bruno and Pietro seem to take up these positions in their own life-journeys respectively.
After the film’s first 35 minutes, it moves forward in time almost two decades, where Bruno and Pietro reunite. They rebuild an Alpine cabin together that Pietro’s father once used. Bruno leads the building and Pietro labors with him.
This dynamic maintains itself, creating more good tensions between the friends. Bruno stays in the mountains as an adult, building a farm and selling artisanal cheese. Pietro, meanwhile, becomes more a man of the world. He lives in the big city, he travels widely, he learns Tibet’s culture.
Every year, the men see each other in or near the Alpine cabin they rebuild. They seem different. They have much different relationships with Pietro’s father. But they share middle-age concerns.
I’m telling you some of the movie’s story, yet this film is really genuine cinema. The shotmaking and sound are the movie, arguably, providing the story with aesthetic nuance. The directors are master shotmakers, framing everything to exaction, even though they simultaneously show the free and open expanse of the Alpine scenery.
Remarkably, this movie is both intimate and expansive, sprawling through time yet particular in each moment. Most good movies are usually one or the other, yet never both. This one is.
Van Groeningen and Vandermeesch use their chosen 4:3 aspect ratio to seeming perfection. They especially use it to describe character mood, story development, and thematic resonance.
An example is Pietro, the man who as a boy could not cross that gap in the glacier. Often, in conversations, he is placed in the lower-half of the frame, the mountain backdrop looming higher above him. Meanwhile, Bruno lives in and has “conquered” the mountains, so he’s higher up in the frame, often for awhile.
But this doesn’t hold true always, and in key conversational moments the filmmakers invert these. Always, the mountains are used not just for pretty pictures but for great effect in every artistic way.
I have high confidence that this film can offer new sustenance on many viewings – or to change the metaphor, offer a new tour of its familiar trodden locale – just by noticing the details and how they relate to the plot and dialogue in the moment.
If nothing else, the cinematography will awe, while the soundtrack (by a Swedish singer doing retro-Americana music) had for me an almost Oregonian hipster feel, signaling that perhaps this is not only a movie about Europeans but about a great many places and people.
And little beats the intimate conversations at night between the men, fire in the foreground, to the side, in the background at seemingly, fire placed in strategic places in the frame at exactly the right moments.
Meanwhile, in these gorgeous nighttime scenes, chiarscuro black looms everywhere.
Note the exact middle of the movie has a scene of importance at night, with fire. The filmmakers undoubtedly admire Nuri Bilge Ceylan like I do, and maybe his great “Winter Sleep,” although their film has a quicker measured pacing than Ceylan’s work. (I disagree with anybody who says this movie is "slow." It's an adagio to the allegretto-films we're used to, but not largo.)
I can’t tell if this is a 2022 or 2023 movie, officially. Whatever year we say it was released officially in, I think it’s one of the year’s best.