Fleapit revisited:The Eight Mountains.

"So far away from those tree lined streets, look so neat. Not for us, no fat chance, we're the mountain people" - Mountain People, Super Furry Animals

When young Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) visits the Aosta valley with his parents, Giovanni (Filippo Timi) and Francesca (Elena Lietti), he makes a new friend in local boy Bruno (Alessandro Borghi). Though neither of them know it at the time it will be a friendship that will inform, and change, both of their lives. In husband and wife team Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch's The Eight Mountains (in Italian, le Otto Montagne) we get to see that friendship develop, fester, and develop again over a period of twenty plus years.

Pietro (played as an adolescent by Andrea Palma and, for most of the screen time as a grown man by Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Francesco Palombelli/Alessandro Borghi) begin their friendship in a way universally recognisable. They wrestle, swim in lakes, tell each other stories, and they walk for miles in the beautiful and awe inspiring mountains and valleys of Aosta.

They don't just love each other. It feels as if they need each other. Bruno's father is always away at work - or drunk - and Pietro's father, Giovanni, only seems to come alive when he's studying maps of the region or, even better, climbing high into the mountains. The glacier atop one of the mountains is a particular source of obsession for Giovanni and an early scene sees the older man ascending it with the young boys.

A task that seems foolhardy at best and one that will leave any vertigo suffers, and I count myself as at least vertigo adjacent, shuddering. That's the thing with these places of sublime beauty. They're also very very difficult places to live. Nature is beautiful but nature is also deadly. Death is simply part of nature. Something Bruno, a boy and then a man who considers himself a mountain person to the core, is both blissfully and painfully aware of.

As the boys get older, they drift apart. Pietro, or Berio as Bruno calls him in his own dialect, into a series of dead end jobs in bars and kitchens in Turin and Bruno into work with his father before building a relationship with Giovanna and joining him on the mountain walks. Pietro, by this point, has long broken all ties with his father and only keeps in touch with the family via his mother.

When a major family event brings Pietro back to Aosta, he is - at first - surprised to find that life has gone on perfectly well without him. It's the folly of a young man's mind to imagine that if he's not involved in events then events simply aren't happening. The world left behind, in a young man's mind, is a world preserved in aspic, stored in a vitrine case to viewed only by historians. For Pietro, it's a bittersweet realisation. To him, Bruno has become a man - he's married Lara (Elisabetta Mazzullo), had a child, and started a business making cheese - whereas Pietro considers himself to still be a boy.

A boy with no direction. Bruno, the more taciturn of the two, encourages Pietro to follow his dream of one day writing a book and that, for unexplained reasons, takes Pietro to Nepal, another - quite famously - mountainous region. But family ties, and even more so - Bruno, keep bringing Pietro back to Aosta and as we see their relationship rebuild itself we find out the deep feelings and motivations which lie within each man.

It can be a slow film, ponderous even, and it takes time to grow into it but it's worth persevering with because like still, or slow running waters, it runs deep. Like, in fact, glaciers. Glaciers store ice from decades, centuries, ago but eventually that ice finally melts and turns to water. Pietro's relationship with his seemingly cold and work obsessed father is like that, Pietro's relationship with the mountains of Aosta is like that, and, more than anything, Pietro's relationship with Bruno is like that. 

Watching the two men chat, laugh, drink grappa, and restore the old mountain shack that Pietro has inherited you may well find yourself considering some of your own closest friendships and you may even come to thinking about how those friendships are so vital in your life. When we're young we take them for granted, they come easy. As we age, we need to work a little harder at them. That doesn't make them less important. That makes them even more special.