The tale begins when Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) meets Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), a local son of cowherders, while vacationing with his parents in the provincial village of Grana. The film’s runtime (nearly two and a half hours long) is a testament to the directors’ thorough commitment to the story, covering wide swaths of time and allowing the sensitive masculine friendship at its center to bloom accordingly.
Cinematographer Ruben Impisn’s Academy ratio accentuates this dichotomy-the squared-off frames don’t truncate the vertiginous beauty of the mountains so much as lend them the weight of nostalgia and hindsight.
The film adaptation, composed of gestures and impressions set against lofty backdrops, feels similarly intimate yet epic in scope. Filmmaker Felix van Groeningen ( The Broken Circle Breakdown) and actress Charlotte Vandermeersch, in her directorial debut, skillfully translate the lauded book, winner of Italy’s Strega Prize and Frances’ Prix Médicis étranger, evocatively relating the power of landscape and memory.Ĭlocking in at just over 200 pages, Cognetti’s novel is a slender but emotionally expansive bildungsroman about the decades-long friendship between Pietro and Bruno, who meet as young boys. The Eight Mountains is a skilled adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s 2016 novel that adheres strictly to both the book’s tone and the author’s intent, with nary the kind of adjustments that might anger devoted readers.
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