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Bruno is a confident, physically vigorous child who can scale the side of a stone building like a goat scampering up a rock face. He’s being raised by his aunt and uncle — his mother is missing in action, his father works abroad as a bricklayer — and is the only child in his village, its population having dwindled, as in other rural areas, to a ghostly near-dozen. But what finally lifts “The Eight Mountains” above those earlier films is a generous, gently unassuming worldview — one that grants everyone their space and their struggles, and that never turns characters into easy symbols or reduces relationships to obvious tensions.
‘The Contestant’ tells the bizarre story of a Japanese man who lived a real-life ‘Truman Show’
In this story, it isn’t an act of betrayal or redemption when a man turns out to be a better, more attentive father to a child other than his own; it simply is what it is, a testament to nature’s unpredictability, a wound and a balm rolled into one. Indeed, one of the more graceful surprises in a story suffused with loss and regret is the way Giovanni and Bruno’s surrogate bond ultimately opens the door, for Pietro, to a deeper kind of reconciliation. It allows him to make peace with a father he barely knew, and with a friend he loves more than he understands. The narration — so often a crutch that book-to-film adaptations rely on too heavily — is sparing. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch smoothly carry Pietro and Bruno across time, which by turns expands and contracts, races forward and decelerates.
An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live
Although the room is no longer a kitchen, knowing it once was made me want to turn this into a “heart of the home” casual gathering space, just as our kitchens are today. House of Nomad’s Berkeley Minkhorst & Kelley Lentini shares with us a glimpse into their favorite home design, along with how this kitchen and dining area was inspired and came together to create a modern oasis. CIRCA’s Heather Smith shares with us a glimpse into one of her favorite design projects, along with how this dining room, lounge and entry was inspired and came together to provide creative possibilities. Charlotte Munder Design is based in West Palm Beach, Florida, and has recently worked on projects in New York City, The Hamptons, Boston, and Palm Beach. “Pacifiction” and “R.M.N.” Two hypnotically absorbing, cryptically titled, insidiously damning panoramas of life in, respectively, the sun-drenched island of Tahiti and a snow-bound Transylvanian village, neither of which you’ll be in a hurry to visit afterward.
Geri from Freespace Design
The Eight Mountains explores the disappointments of adulthood and masculinity through rekindled childhood friendship - ABC News
The Eight Mountains explores the disappointments of adulthood and masculinity through rekindled childhood friendship.
Posted: Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The beauty of Celine Song’s emotionally intimate, philosophically expansive “Past Lives,” played with breathtaking understatement by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, lies in the way romantic desire flickers but never fully ignites, leaving you to imagine what might have been. Meanwhile, the soul of “The Eight Mountains,” Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s glorious male weepie, is in Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli’s performances as boyhood peak pals, brought together by cliffs and ultimately separated by chasms. It is not being too facetious to call this the straight Brokeback Mountain. In building this rudimentary stone hut, they have attempted to rebuild their childhood, rebuild their love for each other. But Pietro is to make a terribly painful discovery that, in his long and bitter absence, his wounded father actually became a friend to the grownup Bruno, hiking with him in the valley and becoming a quasi-father to him. And, to add to the mortification of having his dad stolen from him by Bruno, Pietro finds that the young woman he is sort of interested in, is more interested in the unassuming Bruno.
Review: ‘The Eight Mountains’ is already an art-house hit — and an emotional powerhouse
‘The Eight Mountains’, ‘Exterior Night’ Take Top Honors At Italy’s David di Donatello Awards – Full Nominees and Winners List - Deadline
‘The Eight Mountains’, ‘Exterior Night’ Take Top Honors At Italy’s David di Donatello Awards – Full Nominees and Winners List.
Posted: Thu, 11 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
It’s Me, Margaret” and “Tótem” A young girl’s coming-of-age and her family’s joy and heartache are perfectly observed in both Kelly Fremon Craig’s underappreciated Judy Blume adaptation and Lila Avilés’ haunting work of poetic realism. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” and “Earth Mama” A highly intelligent way with the camera and a deep, intuitive understanding of Black motherhood and childhood distinguished both of these sterling debut features. “About Dry Grasses” and “Godland”Two of the year’s most visually and intellectually immersive films, each pitting one very small man against a vast, sprawling landscape. “The Eight Mountains” is directed by Oscar-nominated Felix van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) and Charlotte Vandermeesch. The cast includes Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, and Elisabetta Mazzullo. The Eight Mountains screened at the Cannes film festival, and is released on 12 May in UK cinemas.
A film like this needs time to establish the building blocks of the relationship and allow the breathing room necessary. Based on a slender, celebrated 2016 novel by the Italian writer Paolo Cognetti, “The Eight Mountains” tracks Pietro across both decades and continents, charting his life through the intense friendship that he makes in childhood with Bruno. They first meet in the summer of 1984, when Pietro’s parents — the family lives in Turin — rent an apartment in a village in the Aosta Valley, a shockingly beautiful swathe of the Italian Alps that borders both France and Switzerland. There, nestled among velvety green slopes and towered over by jagged, soaring peaks, Pietro finds a friend, an ally, a role model and, in time, a sense of belonging. The film tells the story of a close relationship between two young Italian boys who spent their childhoods together in a mountain village before going in different directions.
Years rush by — sometimes in a single, gasp-inducing edit — as the story skitters from one period to the next. It slows down again after the death of Pietro’s father (a terrific, intense Filippo Timi), which provokes some predictable oedipally haunted soul-searching for Pietro and, crucially, brings him back to the mountains and to Bruno. Bushy-bearded and face to face, the men effortlessly reconnect, resuming a friendship that — or so the story insists — has sustained them over time and great distances, allowing them to bridge the often yawning gaps between them. This was one of our favorite projects because the client is such a creative, talented, and trusting woman.
The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one. They love and sustain each other, and it seems telling that neither forms a long-term romantic relationship until they’re adults. Perhaps, during one of the long summer evenings they spend together after Pietro returns to the area, one quietly reaches for the other under the cover of night. The filmmakers don’t say and neither does the novel, which each suggests that material concerns aren’t finally what troubles these two characters. Pietro, the restless, openhearted city boy who narrates “The Eight Mountains,” a tender story about love and friendship, is 11 years old when the movie begins.
The Belgian directing duo discuss how how they translated Paolo Coginetti’s novel into cinematic terms, their approach to music, and more.
Andrea Rauccio is listed as the Steadicam operator, but the credits for camera operators are lengthy, and the entire crew deserves credit. There are times when the camera is so far back that all you see is an entire expanse of white, with a tiny person trekking across the blinding snow. It may be a cliche to say the mountains are the third main character in the film, but it's the truth. In time, he makes it to the top and, barely pausing to take in the staggering view, crows in triumph to his friend Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), who’s doing some construction work down in the valley below. It’s a blissful, tender image of friendship that, like so many images in this movie, contains bittersweet multitudes. Here are two pals sharing a moment of exquisite communion, but who are nonetheless forebodingly separated by a chasm, one that will keep widening despite their every attempt to bridge it.
Pietro’s father’s death reunites the two in realizing his dream of constructing a cabin on the Alps, and the project and subsequent explorations of the awe-inspiring mountain range bond Pietro and Bruno in a shared purpose. Yet despite their connection, the purity of nature and the demands of society both threaten to drive the men to pursue different, possibly irrevocably divergent paths on the vertiginous terrain of life. The mountains in "The Eight Mountains" are the Italian Alps and the Himalayas, equally beautiful, equally intimidating, and dazzling. They are seen with the eyes of two men who know them very well, feel comfortable climbing up and down the steep slopes, and have absorbed mountain life's challenges and joys. Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, "The Eight Mountains" works slowly and patiently. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.
Pietro is the story’s font and focus, which gives Marinelli the more central, psychologically developed role, though the adult actors share the screen as comfortably and generously as the child performers do. “The Eight Mountains” is a memory movie — it opens with a voice-over from the adult Pietro — and Marinelli, with his lilting intonation and startled, near-protuberant eyes, makes a natural and sympathetic lodestar, even when his character (or the story) makes some false moves. (Marinelli played a very different searcher in the 2020 movie “Martin Eden.”) Borghi has far fewer lines, but he brings eloquence to Bruno’s silences. Some obvious drone shots are included, but much of the hiking sequences appear to have been done with Steadicams, following the men through their treacherous treks.
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