First impressions of The Eight Mountains

Two roads diverge in the Italian Alps, then cross and part again and again, in this Belgian saga of a challenging male friendship — but your mileage may vary.

It’s been almost two weeks since I last saw a movie — any movie! I feel faint!

But that’s how things go when Seattle Pacific faculty have “one week of summer left before school starts.” In fact, we don’t have one week of summer left. We need to show up every day for “retreats” (two of them, actually — although they feel more like school seminars or assemblies than retreats), for department meetings, for syllabus revision, and for other class-prep requirements. It’s a week of skyrocketing stress, socializing to the point of exhaustion, and frantic preparation.

That’s why I haven’t posted here for a while.

So, last night I took a little quiet time for myself for the first time in what felt like ages and watched a movie that looked like it might slow down my heart rate for a while.

The Italian Alps — the backdrop for The Eight Mountains. To quote Liz Lemon: “I want to go to there.” [Image from the Picturehouse trailer.]

It did.

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I continue to believe that much of Peter Jackson’s success with his film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings had to do with how enthralled audiences were with seeing the glory of New Zealand — those mountains, those panoramic wildernesses — projected on such a grand canvas. The more our attention is absorbed by screens, the more we tend to be creatures of indoor-habit, and the more we long for what we’re missing: the created world in its sensual, ancient, awe-inspiring glory.

That is, no doubt, why I added The Eight Mountains to my must-see list the first time I saw the trailer. And that will remain, most likely, the thing I cherish most about the experience.

Somehow I’ve missed both of the previous films by director Felix van Groeningen — Beautiful Boy, a reportedly harrowing drug-addiction drama about a father (Steve Carrell) and son (Timothée Chalamet), and The Broken Circle Breakdown, the story of a rocky romance between Belgian bluegrass musicians. The latter was co-directed by Charlotte Vandermeersch, and the two have collaborated again here on this adaptation of a novel by Paolo Cognetti: an epic story of a friendship that began in childhood and remains strained but strangely unbreakable over their courses of their troubled lives.

Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) and Pietro (Luca Marinelli) make their way to the construction site where they’re building a house and reinforcing their friendship. [Image from the Picturehouse trailer.]