‘Nature is great. But when it becomes real, it’s something else’: filming The Eight Mountains

Directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch took to Italy’s beautiful Aosta Valley to make their transcendental movie about male friendship – but couldn’t avoid their own personal issues

“You’re out of focus!” I’ve just logged in to Zoom to talk to Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, and they’re laughing already. “Like in Deconstructing Harry, you know that film?” says Vandermeersch I flap around, fiddling with my webcam, but nothing will correct the me-shaped smear on the screen. Like Robin Williams in the Woody Allen film, blurred outside of the cameras even when he goes home, I feel a flush of existential humiliation creeping up.

I could use a long stay in Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch’s transcendentally clarifying new film The Eight Mountains. A parable of the forking paths of two childhood friends – urbanite Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) and shepherd kid Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), who meet in Italy’s Aosta Valley – it rises up to an epic spiritual panorama as the pair intersect again as adults. Played respectively by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, they shore up their relationship at the same time as they construct the mountain hideaway envisaged by Pietro’s late father: it’s called Barma Drola (“funny haven” in the local Valdôtain dialect). Are we destined, even duty-bound, to follow the trail made by our ancestors? What’s the price of heading off-piste? The film inhales it all in – family, friendship, time and permanence – without a trace of Woody-like self-consciousness.