The Eight Mountains - Review Thread

Trying to cross over into Hollywood is all too often not the smartest career move for a European auteur, especially when the thing they try to cross over with is some kind of standard prestige drama that’s chasing Oscars. Case in point: Felix van Groeningen, director of the touching Belgian melodrama The Broken Circle Breakdown tried to go Hollywood in 2018 by helming the addiction drama Beautiful Boy. There wasn’t anything about that movie that was really fundamentally different from what Groeningen normally does about that movie and really in retrospect the two star rating that I gave it at the time was probably a bit harsh, but the movie was forgettable. A real “This had Oscar Buzz?” movie if ever there was one. But Groeningen does not appear to be trying to continue down that path and has returned to Europe, albeit not his home country, in order to make a much strong follow-up (alongside co-director Charlotte Vandermeersch) with The Eight Mountains, an adaptation of a novel by Paolo Cognetti set in the Northern Italian alps and spanning several decades in the lives to two childhood friends who drift apart and back together over the years. That location in and of itself provides the film with a lot in the way of its visual grandeur, there’s a lot of beautiful mountain scenery to be found and the filmmakers shoot it in the Academy ratio in order to capture the verticality of it all. The two characters at the center are certainly representative of certain class archetypes but not simplistic ones and both have a tendency surprise you with where their lives take them while maybe not surprising you at all in ways that feel right. The film gains power from its novelistic sweep and takes its time to play out, but there are also bits and pieces that feel like relics of the source material and come off as a touch slight in its way. It’s not exactly a “naturalistic” narrative and employs a couple of literary devices, but they work in their own ways and the film as a whole is just a very well told story to immerse yourself in.
**** out of Five