The Eight Mountains
2022 · Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch
An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set in the breathtaking Italian Alps, The Eight Mountains follows over four decades the profound, complex relationship between Pietro and Bruno.
dir. Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch · 2022
Paolo Cognetti's Strega Prize–winning novel arrives on screen as a four-decade chronicle of a friendship: Pietro, a bookish boy from Turin, and Bruno, the last child of a dying Alpine village, who meet one summer in the Aosta Valley and spend the rest of their lives converging on and diverging from each other. The Belgian director Felix van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown, Beautiful Boy) co-directs with his partner Charlotte Vandermeersch, both working in Italian for the first time; the film shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022. The masterstroke is the boxy 4:3 frame — a seeming perversity for mountain scenery that turns out to be the point, forcing the peaks to tower rather than sprawl and pressing the two men together inside the image. Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, longtime friends off screen, age across the decades with unusual delicacy, and Daniel Norgren's raw Swedish blues gives the Alps a strangely borderless sound. A rare epic built from stillness, labor, and the turning of seasons.
Lines of influence
- The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) — Van Groeningen's own template of scoring raw grief with American roots music (bluegrass there, Daniel Norgren's Swedish blues here), letting the soundtrack carry the emotional arc a European milieu wouldn't otherwise supply.
- Beautiful Boy (2018) — Same authorial hand tracing a male bond fracturing and reconverging over years through restrained, non-melodramatic naturalist performance rather than plot incident.
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) — Founds the Italian mode of filming peasant labor with documentary patience and a seasonal-cycle structure, agrarian toil observed as the narrative's actual clock.
- Le quattro volte (2010) — Near-wordless observation of alpine/pastoral life where animal husbandry, weather and the turning seasons replace dialogue as the storytelling engine.
- Happy as Lazzaro (2018) — Rural Italian labor shot on grainy stock in a near-square frame, turning the peasant landscape into a mythic, textured surface rather than picturesque backdrop.
- The Wonders (2014) — Coming-of-age staged inside the physical routines of family agrarian work, using boxy framing and non-professional intimacy to bind childhood to the land.
- First Cow (2019) — 4:3 Academy ratio paired with a male friendship built entirely through shared manual labor in the wilderness, the boxy frame pressing the two men against the landscape.
- Old Joy (2006) — Two men whose lives have diverged reunite on a mountain hike, their friendship measured in silence, drift and terrain rather than confrontation.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005) — Decades-spanning intimacy between two men staged against high-country vistas, using aging performances and returns to the same peaks to register the passage of a life.
- Days of Heaven (1978) — Magic-hour landscape framing that turns seasonal agricultural labor into the film's visual rhythm, wide vistas dwarfing the human figures within them.
- Into the Wild (2007) — Literary adaptation of a man's retreat from society into the mountains, treating wilderness as a spiritual test and structuring the film around a singer-songwriter score.
- The Return (2003) — A masculine bond forged and tested on an arduous wilderness trek, rendered in austere, painterly landscape compositions where nature is antagonist and mirror.
- Boyhood (2014) — Uses performers visibly aging across years so that elapsed time itself becomes the film's structure, exactly the four-decade chronicle device deployed here.
- A River Runs Through It (1992) — Literary-voiceover adaptation of brothers bound to and divided by a mountain landscape, the river standing in as the emotional register of the family.
- Il vento fa il suo giro (2005) — Alpine-village realism rooted in local dialect and the seasonal rhythms of high-mountain herding, filming Alpine community life from the inside.
- Cinema Paradiso (1988) — A decades-spanning male friendship structured around departure from and return to a rural homeland, using aging across time and nostalgia as its formal spine.