The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022) (Patreon)

While watching The Eight Mountains, more than once I thought about Brokeback Mountain, and not just because both films are about the love between two guys, or the fact that Luca Marinelli vaguely resembles Jake Gyllenhaal. No, the main thing was a nagging feeling I had that this film was extremely well made while at the same time painfully obvious, in the way that certain literary adaptations tend to be. And it hit me. The film reminded me of Ang Lee, with his sturdy but slightly impersonal classicism.

Which is to say, if The Eight Mountains were in English (or if it has a well connected distributor like Neon or A24), it would be Oscar bait. And it just happens to be a very solid, even satisfying version of the prestige picture. A very simple story at its core -- a long-term bromance between a City Mouse and a Country Mouse -- The Eight Mountains nevertheless provides enough psychological insight to give us the sense that, across its 150-minute runtime, we have really lived with these men, gotten to see them develop or devolve as the case may be.

Having said all that, there is a limit to how successful a film can be when it is so dutifully committed to all the thematic I-dotting and T-crossing that almost always sounds better on the written page. I'm not familiar with Paolo Cognetti's novel, but I strongly suspect that the source material accounts for Groeningen and Vandermeersch's use of . . . well, "symbolism" isn't the right word, because it is all right there on the surface. Whether it's the "strange tree" that grows well where it sprouts but dies if transplanted, or the titular Nepalese legend regarding eight mountains surrounding a single peak, the film just keeps providing figurative examples of the human relationship that is right there in front of us.

From the get-go, Pietro (Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) are depicted as such opposites that they could reasonably be two halves of the same person. (Pietro's constant voiceover narration begins with an observation about halving and doubling, so this is clearly on Cognetti's mind.) As boys, Bruno was an outdoorsy child of the mountains, and Pietro was a smart but sheltered bourgeois visitor in Bruno's world. From his first failure -- having altitude sickness on a climb with his father (Filippo Timi), not being able to go as far as Bruno could go -- Pietro came to see his best friend as the favored son, and he later discovers that his father continued to have a relationship with Bruno long after Pietro and his father had fallen out.

I'm summarizing plot points much more than I usually do because there's just not very much about The Eight Mountains that is uniquely cinematic. Granted, the cinematography is stunning, since it was shot on location in the Alps, and D.P. Ruben Impens (who incidentally also shot Julia Ducournau's two films) can essentially point his camera in any direction and capture One Perfect Shot. And while the editing isn't exactly sluggish, it is no more than serviceable. Often Eight Mountains feels like a coffee table book for the wealthy and rugged gentleman, a Father's Day gift you might pick up at Restoration Hardware.

Still, the directors have the perfect chops for realizing their upper-middlebrow vision. The only other film of Groeningen's I've seen, The Broken Circle Breakdown, similarly stakes its chips on solid performances, psychological insight, and the rise-and-fall trajectory of a couple's intense relationship. Where that film was about a man and woman failing to deal with the death of their young daughter, Eight Mountains is about anomie and neurosis, although this isn't emphasized. 

Pietro disappointed his dad by dropping out of college, bumming around and trying to find himself. He saw so many opportunities before him that, in a panic, he chose none. But he does eventually figure his shit out, moving to Nepal, falling in love, and becoming a travel writer. Bruno, by contrast, is working class and provincial, and his own family never thinks about what he might want. Rather, he does what everyone has always done, and when pressed, he sees Pietro's choices as not for the likes of him. He has a clear place in the world, and this frees him from Pietro's modern neuroticism. 

But eventually mountain life becomes a prison for Bruno. When things don't work out -- when his artisanal cheese business fails, or when his wife and daughter move away -- he doubles down, since without the mountain, he has no idea who he is. Would Bruno have taken chances, and discovered disappointment, had Pietro never entered his life? Difficult to say, but it seems significant that the time when both Pietro and Bruno are happiest is when they are rebuilding the hillside home, focused on a very specific physical task. And even though I kept rolling my eyes and remembering this idiotic film, The Eight Mountains manages to create a context in which its leaden metaphors seem lighter than they should. 

This is the kind of film I don't like, and yet I didn't actually dislike this film. I'm not sure what that means, but there you have it.