The Eight Mountains – 2022
We are supposed to dream big when we imagine a 2 ½ hour film based on an award-winning Italian novel whose camera features cinema-size mountain vistas. Happily, though, this is a film ready to offer many pleasures that meet us on small and human levels.
Through the course of the film, we follow the string of the friendship between Pietro and Bruno as it stretches out over thirty years of their lives. It is always a dicey prospect watching a film take the massive time span of a large novel and condense it down to the length of a film. One of the small pleasures this particular film gives us is simply that it spans this length of time unobtrusively and fairly effortlessly. We don’t have to suffer any unconvincing aging makeup jobs or intrusive explanations of everything that has happened in the years that have passed. The movie moves through these years as gracefully as its light clouds wisp over the imposing mountain at the film’s center.
Another of the film’s pleasures that meets us down at our level here on earth is its use of music. Directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch actually take a big risk when they use Daniel Norgren’s vocal music at many key moments of the film. We can imagine that layering singer-songwriter Norgren’s tunes over the simple human drama of The Eight Mountains could have gone badly wrong, as this is a drama with a lot of quiet time and space on its hands. Instead, Norgren’s forlorn, otherworldly folk songs seems to breathe in and out along with the film. These songs have a deep emphasis on mortality and yet at times they also call us to reach for intimacy in our present relationships. As such, the songs follow the contour of the film’s themes. Breathing with the film and us, then, this music lyricizes the personal journeys we see on the screen.
Finally, the friendship of the central pair of men ends up being experienced by us as a journey of slow and considered steps rather than as a journey of grand emotion. There are times, I admit, when I wanted more expression and emotion in these two actors (Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi) in their together and solo scenes. However, this is a pair of friends who weigh what they say before they say it and guard their emotions in ways that fit the mold of their characters. This is in some ways a story about friendship fighting for ground against isolation, and because it IS that the measured and careful progress of the friendship is rich to behold.
When the camera rests on the slowly building dawn over the end credits, we realize we have joined Pietro and Bruno on their journey in a more simple way than we do in most films of this size and scope. We have joined them in a way that may remind us of our own seasons of isolation and friendship, and have considered the precious cost exacted by each of those.
