‘The Eight Mountains’ — Where Does the Time Go and Take Everything?
‘The Eight Mountains’ — Where Does the Time Go and Take Everything?
One of the year's best films is a reflective masterpiece on friendship and nature, which poignantly correlates with my own bittersweet past and memories
To be a child is to wonder. When I was about 12, my grandfather used to take me fishing on the outskirts of his tiny village (which counted maybe a thousand souls at the time) in the summer to a massive lake where animals outnumbered people. I was a boy living in a city ruled by concrete about an hour away, who had no idea this would become one of his most cherished memories. The quiet countryside, filled with vast golden meadows where the occasional pickup trucks stirred up thick dust in their trails, getting from one rural spot to another. I had the privilege to be a kid experiencing life as an adventure for some years before adulthood snatched away my innocence as it always does. If you were lucky enough to do the same somewhere far from the city's noise, you’re likely among the few who had a magical childhood worth remembering.
In Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeerch’s latest Italian movie, The Eight Mountains, Pietro (played by Lupo Barbiero and Luca Marinello) is among those fortunate few, too. He lives with his family in Turin, but during the summer of 1984, his parents rent a house in Grana, a tiny village in the Italian Alps. There, he meets Bruno (Cristiano Sassella and Alessandro Borghi), the sole child within miles, who happens to be around his age. As the two run around and play in the valley filled with mooing cows, boundless meadows, and air so fresh you’d think it could keep you alive forever, they quickly develop an unlikely bond. Through Bruno’s plain yet rich worldview, Pietro slowly learns to embrace a quiet life and live it to its fullest. When he returns to Turin for a short while, he grows weary of the town and longs for the slopes and the company of his new friend, counting the days until he can go back.
It's somewhat typical that their friendship begins to crumble when the adults interfere. Since Bruno comes from a poor and troubled family — he’s raised by his aunt and uncle because his parents don’t much care for him — Pietro’s folks offer to take him back to the city to get a proper education. It speaks to the script’s intelligence (adapted from Paulo Cognetti’s novel) that Pietro becomes furious by their decision. He instinctively knows that Turin will ruin someone like Bruno, a true mountaineer, who was born to graze cows and make cheese in the mountains — what he loves and respects him for. Bruno doesn’t understand or know whether this change would be good for him but wants to go. He’s never seen anything other than this isolated place where he marched up and down his whole life. Although his uncle has an agreement with Pietro's parents, he gets taken away by his father to work with him at construction sites in other towns. This fractures Pietro’s relationship with his parents, blaming them for over a decade, especially his father, whom he eventually stops talking to entirely until his death.
There's a poignant similarity here that correlates with my own childhood. I knew someone like Bruno in my grandpa's village. He used to join us in fishing whenever he didn’t have to work with his folks at home. He was the first person I met who came from true poverty, which I only saw on television before. Full of life, pragmatic and spontaneous, he knew a lot about fishing and had a sense of humor I'd never encountered until then. We had nothing in common but spent days of fun together till one day he just stopped coming. We didn’t know each other enough to be friends but had a smooth rapport that could’ve led us there. And just like Pietro, I could never picture him in a city or think that that was what he needed, even though I suspected he was illiterate and uneducated, too. Despite his circumstances, he was content and oblivious to the problems rooted in his upbringing. After that summer, I never saw or heard about him ever again.
Besides a brief adolescent encounter, Bruno and Pietro don't see each other again until they're in their early 30s. It's a death that brings them back together in Grana, and by this point, they're practically strangers. Time isn't kind to estranged relationships. Yet there’s still some of the boys they once were in them (though matured and toughened by adult life) that sustains a thin connection. And just like 15-odd years ago, spending a summer together in that beauty of a place, building a weekend house up in the mountains, reconnects them in a way none of them expects. It’s one of life’s gifts how little is enough for two vastly different men to build a bond by working alongside each other. By the time they finish the house, its foundation is strong enough to weather the most brutal winters — and it seems their rekindled friendship will do the same, too. They make an unwritten promise: no matter what happens, they will meet back here every summer at a home none of them really owns, but it’s theirs regardless.
As you watch them become a pivotal cornerstone in each other’s lives again, you inevitably shift into your own memories about the friends you loved and lost in one way or another. For me, that means my once-best friend I shared my childhood and most of my adult existence with — and whom I fell out with a couple of years ago. I see so much of him in Bruno (his simplistic worldview, selflessness, and good heart), and much of me in Pietro (an insecure guy, constantly searching for something), that I feel like The Eight Mountains was somehow tailor-made for me. As I watch the two reunite every year at the home they built together to honor a promise, I wonder where the time goes and why it has to take everything I treasure until nothing is left but regrets and heartbreakingly beautiful memories. The eventual fate of Bruno and Pietro represents how delicate friendships are, and how time molds them into ancient stalagmites by breaking off pieces of our hearts we never get back.
There's a scene right after Pietro and Bruno meet as adults when the former finds out his friend kept in touch with his family, always asking about him in the past 15 years. Baffled, Pietro says resignedly, “That's what happens to those who leave. The others continue to live without him,” referring to himself. He knows that if you abandon your life and leave behind the people you love, you have no right to resent them for moving on with their lives that you're no longer a part of — even if you never stopped living without them in your heart for one second.
The Eight Mountains effortlessly captures these hard-to-bear emotions that connect invisibly to reveal themselves at the end in a devastating yet heartfelt conclusion. Through the passage of time, our dearest memories (as children and as adults) petrify into an emotional state we simply can't access anymore. All we can do is remember and view them from afar, from years of distance, and remind ourselves how lucky we were to experience them in the first place. And hope that one day we’ll come across something equally wonderful in a place that fills our lungs with an air of joy, fresh and life-affirming.
You can rent The Eight Mountains on Amazon Prime.
Last week I reviewed David Fincher’s return to thrillers, The Killer, a deftly layered character study of a hitman whose disciplined tranquility is something else. Soon, I’ll be coming with more movie and TV reviews.
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