There’s nothing quite like the fast friendships children make on holiday. The Eight Mountains quickly establishes an enduring bond between its pre-teen leads: showing them splashing around creeks, running through fields and making mischief in a series of golden-hued vignettes. As the English translation of his name infers, Pietro becomes Bruno’s rock, a sturdy, reliable presence in his life despite the class differences that conspire to drive them apart. The problem with rocks, though, is that they can easily crumble.
Three sets of actors communicate Pietro and Bruno’s uneasy fraternity – plotting their growth from bandy-kneed boys to bearded men – with each pairing deepening our understanding of them. It’s a quiet film, where the unsaid is just as powerful as spoken dialogue. So it’s a shame that the lyrics to Daniel Norgren’s folksy soundtrack vocalise the characters’ pent-up feelings. The oddly literary voiceover, delivered with hushed reverence by Luca Marinelli’s adult Pietro, is similarly overdetermined, but does instil a pleasing, wistful tone.
The film, which picked up Cannes’ Jury Prize last May, is stunning to behold, its lush, verdant cinematography drinking in the natural splendour of the Italian Alps. There’s a real tactility to the imagery. You can practically taste the fireside meals, feel the crunch of snow underfoot. While the film is a pleasurably rambling journey through the peaks and valleys of Pietro and Bruno’s relationship, it loses momentum by the final stretch, groaning under the weight of repetitive plotlines and cliché (a sequence of an unfit Pietro learning to scale a mountain reads like an arthouse spin on Rocky ascending the Philly steps). For all its familiar tropes, The Eight Mountains is still an affecting tale of lingering regrets, squandered opportunities and lost connections that asks whether social mobility is truly possible.