EReally looking at a person for the first time is like trying to comprehend an unknown mountain from the valley below: the eye scans the lines and surfaces, but what the world is like from it eludes knowledge. Wanting to make friends and longing for a new horizon are not only related metaphorically. “Friendship is a place”, it says in “Eight Mountains”.
The Belgian director couple Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch capture such a moment of first glance in the strong first chapter of their two and a half hour mountain and friendship epic: Pietro, an eleven-year-old boy from the city, spends the holidays with his parents in the mid-eighties almost depopulated mountain village in the Aosta Valley.
One day Bruno, who is the same age, is sitting at the table, “the last child in the village”, as he will call himself with a mixture of melancholy and pride. The strange boy tells the strange mother in monosyllables that his father works abroad and that he helps his aunt tend the cows. Ruben Impens’ focused camera doesn’t make a fuss about this scene, instead simply showing the boys sitting next to each other, not even looking at each other. When Pietro’s mother asks the little guest: “And where is your mom?”, instead of answering, he chokes on another biscuit. Only then does Pietro turn his bright eyes from the side to Bruno. As if he had recognized his friend for life at that moment.
In contrast to another current mountain film set in Italy, Michelangelo Frammartino’s “Il Buco – Ein Alley of the Cave”, which abstracts from man and his striving, this adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel takes the alpine landscape as its main focus, around a classic developmental novel to illustrate. Since Romanticism, a story like this has required the friendship of two opposite men: one roams the world, the other is sedentary; one intellectual, the other practical. Body and soul.
Update als Hipster
The two of them communicate without many words, more by doing. It quickly gets physical, they tickle each other while giggling in a meadow, jump into the mountain lake, roam through the ruins of the village, tap into an electric fence to listen to the radio. This touchingly unpathetic staged boy’s idyll will soon come to an end for years: Pietro’s parents want to take Bruno with them to Turin and send them to high school like a second son. Bruno’s father prevents that. Pietro is also against it: “The city will destroy him!” He predicts country-loving.
The narrow 4:3 picture format is initially very good at capturing this childishly restricted world, in which everything is enough and at the same time refers to the immeasurable. Lupo Barbiero (Pietro) and Cristiano Sassella (Bruno) still embody this shimmering openness.
Years later, the friendship arrives as an update, complete with a double hipster beard, as if strapped into the new millennium. Nature boy Bruno, played by Alessandro Borghi as an adult, becomes a bricklayer and cheesemaker. Pietro (Luca Marinelli), on the other hand, is looking for himself: in distant, fairly close-by Nepal. And becomes a writer. The more he tries to conjure up the essential, the more the film, in all careful slowness, runs out of breath. The typified adult versions of the friends do not redeem what was previously laid out as a space of possibility.
This becomes all the more clear when, after the death of Pietro’s father, the overwhelming mountains move back into the focus of the childhood friends: the two of them will build a house, high up in seclusion, in order to fulfill a promise that Bruno made to the old man. After all, Bruno had become his surrogate son, while Pietro had broken off contact.
Back to nature: Luca Marinelli as Pietro, the writer from the city
Source: dpa
The archaic nature of a paternal law lies explicitly over this quasi-brother couple. In a Garden of Eden like this, women only bring problems. They ask annoying questions or give orders like Bruno’s aunt used to, or they are pale and weak like Pietro’s mother. Close to heaven, the men celebrate their bond around the campfire. “Brokeback Mountain,” for straight guys in need of solace, rightly etched one critic a little rightly about this film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
A woman will of course show up anyway, if only to put the male friendship to the test. Otherwise Lara (Elisabetta Mazzullo) doesn’t matter to the film. As with the cattle trade, Bruno checks with his friend whether something is “working” between the two of them. He says no, although Lara clearly shows interest in him. She is already starting a family with Bruno. Clichés like these earned the film a reputation for playing on stale patriarchal notions. The 4:3 picture format can no longer give density to the thinning of the content; instead, mountains, beards, film and silence primarily have length and breadth.
Soothing folk songs by the Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren underscore the cozy hut romance just below the kitsch line. It seems as if Felix van Groeningen’s work, which has so far been devoted primarily to the tragic comedy of becoming a man and being a father (“The Broken Circle”, “Beautiful Boy” or “The Beschissenheit der Dinge”), finds an ultimate sanctuary in the mountains.
But in its fixation on an old-fashioned concept of masculinity that some are currently wanting to bring back, “Acht Berge” provides a rather decent counterpart to that cinema that is rediscovering the mountains and their resilience in order to tell of radical loneliness or a for each other that norms of the world, such as “Märzengrund” by Adrian Goiginger or “Three Winters” by Michael Koch.
Hardly any summit is climbed with difficulty, for which the film would really have enough time, but instead skipped over at a lively jog and surrounded by a camera drone flying around. Man is actually always at the top. What you can see from there is a narrow little world.