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. The region, with its scenic lakes and jaw-dropping vistas, is a boundless sun-drenched playground. It’s here that Pietro meets Bruno, a boy roughly the same age, who swiftly becomes his friend and guide. 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. Memory looms large in “The Eight Mountains,” nearly as large as the craggy peaks that fill the frame and offer a misleading explanation of the movie’s title (which it shares with its source material, a 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti). It’s as if he’s finally mastered his environs, and perhaps even found a way to honor the father whose memory at once haunts and sustains him. And so it means something when, years later, the fully grown Pietro makes it to that rocky summit, tired but triumphant, and breaks into an exuberant dance. You might flash back to an earlier moment from their boyhood days, when young Pietro (Lupo Barbiero), unaccustomed to high altitudes, collapsed in exhaustion while mountain climbing, embarrassing himself in front of his nature-loving father, Giovanni (Filippo Timi), and the tougher, hardier Bruno (Cristiano Sassella). The scene is especially moving because even by this point, fairly early in a picture that runs almost 2 ½ hours and spans a few decades, you already have a good understanding of who Pietro and Bruno are, how they live, what they long for. Here are two pals sharing a moment of exquisite communion, but who are nonetheless forebodingly separated by a chasm, one that will keep widening despite their every attempt to bridge it. It’s a blissful, tender image of friendship that, like so many images in this movie, contains bittersweet multitudes. In time, he makes it to the top and, barely pausing to take in the staggering view, crows in triumph to his friend Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), who’s doing some construction work down in the valley below. In the most exhilarating moment in “The Eight Mountains,” a movie of soaring visual majesty and churning emotional force, a dark-haired young man named Pietro (Luca Marinelli) clambers excitedly up a rocky slope somewhere in the Italian Alps, the camera keeping pace with his slow but steady ascent.
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