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There are moments when these ravishments come close to the touristic, though this is attenuated by the filmmakers’ unexpected use of the boxy Academy ratio. Here, this square framing has the old-fashioned quality of early still photographs, particularly in some of the opening scenes, which avoids the postcard-like associations these landscapes might have had in wide-screen. These early scenes are intoxicating, partly because it’s very pleasant to watch happy children just be happy together, and this is an especially stunning place to explore. Like Pietro, you are immediately plunged into the region’s splendors and mysteries, its densely sheltering foliage, enigmatically abandoned corners and dramatic, seemingly limitless vistas.
Le Otto Montagne, Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch at the heart of an unswerving friendship
Pietro visits Lara who tells him that she now understands how little she means to Bruno in comparison to his mountain. Pietro remarks that he wandered too far away and should have stayed there. He makes up with Bruno who accepts his life living alone in the mountains. Bruno tells him to not worry about him for the mountain has never hurt him. A prematurely uprooted childhood friendship reverberates across years of absence, only to be rekindled with joy, regret and a sense of irreversible loss.
‘Past Lives’ 8. ‘The Eight Mountains’
When one of us said, “I believe in this,” then there’s something there that’s really valuable. We were happy, the producers were happy, and Felix suddenly proposed to direct the whole thing together. Have faith.” It was this big journey for us as a family, going to Italy with our son and making it a very shared experience, not [Felix] leaving us for a year and a half.
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At Cannes, critics praised the film’s attention to detail and the way it used elements of nature to conjure the feelings of magic that childhood friendships can create. It’s been a long time since Pietro has seen Bruno too; like so many childhood friendships, theirs faded as the two grew up and went their separate ways. The house is soon finished, and over time it becomes a place for them to reunite every summer, a high-altitude oasis amid lives often adrift in confusion and uncertainty.
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Bruno confronts Pietro with the aimlessness of his life and pushes him to help him build the house his father had wanted. Bruno plans to restore his uncle's pasture and continue living the life of a mountaineer, and encourages Pietro to follow his dream and write a book. An unusual pairing, to be sure, but one that for me makes a sad and sublime kind of sense.
Review: The Eight Mountains - Cineuropa
Review: The Eight Mountains.
Posted: Thu, 19 May 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Bruno is a confident, physically vigorous child who can scale the side of a stone building like a goat scampering up a rock face. He’s being raised by his aunt and uncle — his mother is missing in action, his father works abroad as a bricklayer — and is the only child in his village, its population having dwindled, as in other rural areas, to a ghostly near-dozen. But what finally lifts “The Eight Mountains” above those earlier films is a generous, gently unassuming worldview — one that grants everyone their space and their struggles, and that never turns characters into easy symbols or reduces relationships to obvious tensions.
So it’s a relief to report that Tóth, co-adapting with Klára Muhi a novel by Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi, handles this intermittent tension — both what’s interior and unarticulated, and what’s externally threatening — with an appreciative subtlety, and without a hint of soapiness. Tóth nods cautiously toward a dignified ambiguity, what can exist in the molecules between vulnerable souls in the process of rebuilding. Aldó, played by Károly Hajduk, is a wiry, disheveled figure with benevolent eyes and a haunted air, whose entire life is his ob-gyn practice since losing his family in the camps. When he meets angrily self-possessed 16-year-old patient Klára (Abigél Szőke), she’s coming out of a delayed puberty, still writing letters to parents whose absence she can explain away, and railing against life under her discipline-intensive, exasperated great-aunt Olgi (Mari Nagy). There’s an easy, flinty chemistry between Marinelli and Borghi, which is especially interesting given each is somewhat counterintuitively cast in a role for which the other might seem a more obvious choice.
"THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS" - Next Best Picture
"THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS".
Posted: Fri, 20 May 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains
[We were] sharing and learning this language together, immersing ourselves into new world. Also, our boy really found his way there and made friends, and he loves to go back to the mountains. It really helped us mature and enter into a new phase of our relationship. An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery, THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS is a landmark cinematic experience as intimate as it is monumental, as deep as it is expansive. As they mature, Pietro becomes estranged from his business-minded father (Filippo Timi) even as Bruno—emotionally abandoned by his own father—takes up the role of surrogate son.
In Le Otto Montagne (The Eight Mountains) - and for their first selection In Competition - the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch explore the bonds that unite childhood friends over time. A film where the mountain stands out as a majestic backdrop to this unswerving relationship, portrayed on the screen by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. Before long we’re with Bruno, Pietro and Giovanni on that prematurely aborted mountain climb — a visually stunning scene that drives home the most obvious difference between Bruno, the country boy entirely at ease outdoors, and Pietro, the city kid gasping for air. The scene also hints at a fast-forming bond between Giovanni and Bruno, a development that leaves Pietro on the outside looking in. He’s never really connected with his father, an unhappy engineer whose attitude shifts with his altitude; distant and distracted at sea level, he comes to life in these snowy heights. That erratic temperament is a turn-off for Pietro, who becomes ever more estranged from his father as a teenager (played, briefly, by Andrea Palma) and eventually an adult.
In an interview with the directors, Van Groeningen said they were very moved by the characters in the book, which he called “a simple story, an epic really, set against a beautiful backdrop” that spoke to him directly, with elements “That were very very personal to me,” he said. Designed for a young family with ties to New York, this whole home design is just what the clients had in mind—modern but warm and functional for their daily life with two young children. Anne Buresh shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this family room was inspired and came together to create timeless serenity. Feeling dissatisfied with his aimless life, Pietro decides to reinvent himself by visiting Nepal.
The story begins in the summer of 1984, when 11-year-old Pietro and his parents, who live in Turin, spend the summer in a small Alpine village. It’s here that Pietro meets Bruno, a boy roughly the same age, who swiftly becomes his friend and guide. The region, with its scenic lakes and jaw-dropping vistas, is a boundless sun-drenched playground. And the writer-directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch joyously capture the boys’ rambunctious, rough-and-tumble innocence, the pure happiness we see coursing through their faces and bodies as they run, wrestle, yell and explore.
His dream is to take over his aunt and uncle's abandoned dairy farm, where he can make cheese and live the life of his ancestors. The passage of time, and Pietro's voiceover, show the film's novelistic source material. It’s the spreading tale of a friendship that begins one mid-’80s summer, when city kid Pietro (played as a child by Lupo Barbiero) comes with his mother on vacation to Grana, a tiny fading hamlet nestled under the crushing, snow-capped immensity of the nearby Alps.
In Andrew Haigh’s metaphysical heartbreaker “All of Us Strangers,” a lonely screenwriter (Andrew Scott, giving the performance of the year) falls for a handsome neighbor and reunites with his long-dead parents. In “The Boy and the Heron,” likely the final animated marvel from the 82-year-old Hayao Miyazaki (though we can hope otherwise), a boy ventures into a fantastical realm and reckons with his mother’s recent death. In both movies, painful memories become wondrous hallucinations, a tower becomes a portal between worlds, and questions of reality versus fantasy, or old versus young, blur into insignificance. Miyazaki asks us how we live; Haigh, with no less urgency, asks us how we love. The Belgian writer-directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch keep the characters — and the movie — immersed in beauty as the children grow up, drift apart and reunite as adults. Working with the cinematographer Ruben Impens, they give you a sense of tangible place as they plot the area’s profound geometry, roam across its shimmering glacial snow and catch the backlit mist wreathing the mountains.
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