Months ago I saw a tweet spelling out the way humans mistake indoors and outdoors and how they’re really one and the same. We’re always outdoors, we’ve just built shelter to get in the way of that understanding. Camping and hiking and being outdoors as much as one can is how one keeps oneself in touch with that fact. The bigger the shelter, the less one thinks about that fact.
The two protagonists of the recently-released The Eight Mountains, lifelong friends Pietro and Bruno, together built a house in the Italian alps on the site of a ruin that Pietro’s father, Giovanni, left for his surrogate son, Bruno. The construction of this chalet (if that’s even the proper term) is the sort of shelter built not in ignorance of nature but in collaboration with it. The weather in the Alps and the hikes that are required for building materials or other human interaction are legitimate obstacles for Pietro and Bruno. We see the two men at three different periods of their lives and their life together; the twelve-year old and thirty-something episodes take up almost the entire narrative (and it feels a bit too long), with a brief look at Pietro’s life as a sixteen-year old and a briefer glance of Bruno one summer afternoon. The film is based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti and hews close to the yearning vistas of Brokeback Mountain with a dash of Ferrante. Pietro does not learn until after Giovanni dies (at the age of 62, exactly twice Pietro’s age) that Giovanni and Bruno maintained a close relationship, for several decades in which Pietro did not speak to his father, until Giovanni’s death. Pietro and Bruno spend the summers of their early 30s on the side of a mountain above Grana, building the house and rekindling their friendship, not far from where it started.
As the house nears completion, Pietro and Bruno promise that even though Giovanni left the ruins to Bruno to build on, the house is theirs together. And so it becomes a mountain retreat for Pietro, who as a boy protested his parents’ attempts to bring Bruno home to Turin with them at the end of one summer, and his friends from the restaurant he now works at in Turin. But it becomes a home for Bruno, who, with his healthy beard and thick, vaguely defined biceps, is a mountaineering man who never felt of a place with the cities below; he instead stays in the Alps and resurrects his uncle’s mountain pasture, an alpeggio.
Pietro slowly begins to piece together the rest of his life: he becomes clearly but informally involved with one of his friends whom he brings to the cabin, a hostess at the restaurant named Lara. He comes into some writing success. On a trip amongst Pietro and his friends to the cabin, Lara and Bruno discuss over a campfire the difference between being in nature and existing in the mountains, among the forests and rivers, a natural place but not necessarily something vague like nature. It’s a somewhat metaphysical film anyway but as urban areas become even more crowded and desirable and expensive while the dream of living among nature seems less and less possible to most people, Bruno’s suggestion serves as a reminder that humans were meant to live this way. The film runs from 1984 to the early 2000s, and only vaguely gestures to the existence of the internet as Pietro begins to connect with fellow climbers in Nepal and continues to write, but the film nonetheless feels certain that humans lost something when we began to begin to all coexist together all the time.
It’s a tender film that does not bask in questions about the masculinity or sexuality of its lead friendship but still recognizes the inherent transactions that humans expect from all their relationships, regardless of their authenticity to those involved with them. Pietro’s father confronts him at sixteen, warns him against the dangers of wasting his life with dreams of being a writer or an intellectual. Pietro rebuttals that Giovanni was the one who’s wasted his life, and it’s a reminder that so many parents think that what is best for their children is the same thing that may have worked out or will work out for them. When Bruno later tells Pietro that he was meant to be a mountain man, and that his uncle removing him from his lineage’s line of duty probably ruined the course of Bruno’s life. Lara is drawn to the mountain life after her first visit to the cabin, and despite her flirtations with Pietro, eventually her proximity to Bruno at the pasture results in child. Yet Bruno grows distant from his family; and Pietro leaves Italy and returns and leaves again and his life continues, mostly between Turin and Nepal. He worries.
Bruno and Pietro’s friendship is marked by trust, the understanding that each man is his own man and he will eventually find what is best and he will do that. For Bruno, it means a child without a father and an isolated existence in the Alps, where he eventually dies. Pietro never feels tied to a place like Bruno was tied to the cabin and to the pasture, and so he continues to float through his adulthood with a purpose that slowly grows more definite, as writing success slowly arrives and a woman(/hiking buddy? she receives short shrift) enters his life. He marks his hikes around the Alps as well as, presumably, the Himalayas, as a way to make up for lost time with his father as well as with Bruno. Their kindred love of the mountains is more than just a coexistence with nature, it’s a simplified version of three men’s relationship that, below the surface, was too complex for city life.
At 24, I’m beginning to figure out that the tenor of adult life is mostly just a wave of sequential highs and lows of varying heights, and this wonderful TikTok (and posted by the same person as the tweet above) is majorly helpful to me as a reminder that the lows are fine and they’re going to happen. Just don’t let them get in the way of the paths I’m building to make the highs more attainable for longer periods of time. A friend texted me this week during downward turns for the both of us; “Weird question,” she texted, “but do you think there is meaning to life?” My gut answer for about four years now has been no. But if there is, we are socialized into chasing the wrong meanings. Humans were meant to live in small communities across mountains and river valleys and all the forests in between; never were we all supposed to be yelling into our screens about the same famous narcissists whose navel-gazing “transgression” is the only draw of their art, yet we mine more and more meaning to it because we can’t help but continue to argue.
This film here is something far more impressive than a piece of cultural shock pop: a slow-burning, life-spanning (like I said, it feels too long; that it spans several decades probably contributes to that) story about the evolution of friendship and the weight that the world and all its other residents place upon it. Were I not equally in an existential mood the evening my friend asked me about the meaning of life, had I decided to be brief (which would have been a mistake), I might have said something like, “Watch this movie.”