Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on 'Eight Mountains'

Table Of Content

• Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains
• The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023
• ‘The Contestant’ tells the bizarre story of a Japanese man who lived a real-life ‘Truman Show’
• Meredith from Georgia Street Design
• The Eight Mountains
• Peerspace appreciates Charlotte interior designers

Strangely, The Eight Mountains is the second film this year from Ghent-based directors, after Lukas Dhont’s Close, to feature a thicker-than-thieves young male friendship. “The resemblance is crazy,” says Vandermeersch, “even though our story moves over 30 years. Our boys also play with each other in a way that’s still innocent.” But it was actually the two directors, who are married with a young son, who were brought closer together by the film.

Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains

The two boys come from different worlds but are the only children in the village. They become friends instantly, out of convenience, but also because they throw themselves into shared activities with the easy trust children often have. They have an idyllic summer, wandering the steep slopes, swimming in a blue-green mountain lake, and at one point, hauling rocks into a stream to build a makeshift dam. Bruno and Pietro reunite every summer, picking up where they left off. Sometimes friendships formed in childhood are like that if we're lucky. It really helped us rediscover each other and see how complementary we are and trust each other’s instincts.

Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains - slantmagazine

Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains.

Posted: Fri, 28 Apr 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023

Interview: 'The Eight Mountains' Directors Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch - First Showing

Interview: 'The Eight Mountains' Directors Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch.

Posted: Wed, 23 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

By the time Giovanni dies suddenly, he and Pietro haven’t spoken or seen each other in years. In many ways, their collaboration behind the camera gracefully complements the narrative that transpires in front of it. The Eight Mountains is a gentle two-hander following two friends, the impetuous Bruno and the introverted Pietro (played respectively as adults by Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli), that charts the ups and downs of their relationship over the course of four decades. These two childhood pals bond as boys in the Italian Alps, a tender connection disrupted by Bruno’s departure for education and business in an urban environment. For those looking for something a little more modern, look no further than Kimberly from KBN Interiors.

‘The Contestant’ tells the bizarre story of a Japanese man who lived a real-life ‘Truman Show’

Gray Walker shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this cool modern dining room was inspired and came together to create wanderlust. Anne collaborated with the homeowners to create the perfect space for them. “I wanted to truly reflect a modern manor family room that has elegance, warmth, and flow so that it would be a gathering point for conversation, reading, games, and maybe an apéritif,” says Anne.

Meredith from Georgia Street Design

Charlotte wanted to further develop her design skills and received her graduate degree in Interior Design and Architecture from the Parsons School of Design with honors. She also spent time working for the esteemed interior design firms Pembrooke & Ives and David Scott Interiors. Being around since 2010, their signature style is all about emphasizing color and fresh patterns. They want to influence spaces while helping people feel the space and what it’s all about. This native has essentially been considered the “face of interiors in Charlotte.” This is also literal as she’s been on the front cover of Charlotte Magazine for two consecutive years.

Bruno is a confident, physically vigorous child who can scale the side of a stone building like a goat scampering up a rock face. He’s being raised by his aunt and uncle — his mother is missing in action, his father works abroad as a bricklayer — and is the only child in his village, its population having dwindled, as in other rural areas, to a ghostly near-dozen. But what finally lifts “The Eight Mountains” above those earlier films is a generous, gently unassuming worldview — one that grants everyone their space and their struggles, and that never turns characters into easy symbols or reduces relationships to obvious tensions.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Van Groeningen noted that Marinelli and Borghi played friends before in Claudio Caligari’s gritty “Non essere cattivo” (“Don’t Be Bad”) which went to Venice in 2015. It was a time to sit back and reassess your way of living; our way as human beings on the planet to find new respect for the earth. The directors wrote the script during lockdown and both say it was “really nice” to be in the Alps and in Nepal, which are the film’s two main locations, at that particular time. This “trip that we made in our fantasy to these corners of the world during lockdown” seeped into the film, Vandermeersch noted.

So poor Pietro leaves all over again, travelling in Nepal and becoming a celebrated writer, but consumed with the thought that his friendship with Bruno was the best of him – and Bruno was in some elemental sense the better man. The Aosta valley is depicted with magnificent sweep, and van Groeningen and Vandermeersch find a stratum of sadness under it, a kind of water table of tears. Some real mountain climbing is done in "The Eight Mountains," and some of the footage is awe-inspiring. The men go on hikes, stalking across the trails at the top, abysses opening up on either side. Bruno is comfortable in the mountains—he couldn't live anywhere else—and Pietro, whose workaholic dad really only came alive when he went on mountain hikes, becomes one of those wanderlust backpackers flooding into Tibet. 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.

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As rescuers had broken into the house by making a hole in the roof, Pietro reasons that the house will therefore not last either because in some lives, there are mountains to which one cannot return, including the one at the center of it all. As he plays soccer with children at Asmi's school, he realizes that all that remains is to wander the eight mountains because on the highest mountain, he lost a friend. Returning to Grana, he informs Bruno of his plans to settle down in Nepal and probably will not be returning to Grana yearly; Bruno invites him to dinner.

The precise nature of the men’s disquiet remains blurry, almost as if no one has ever seen an Antonioni film, though there are suggestions that the world beyond the valley — with its dirty air and noisy streets, its violence and politics — is a prime suspect. Yet even when that outside world bears down on Pietro and especially Bruno, the movie skitters away from messy, unpleasant particulars, which makes its painful passages easier to take but also blunts its impact. Both death and taxes take a heavy toll on the characters, exacting a cost that will make you weep even as the filmmakers smooth out the rough edges, crank the soulful tunes and turn their limpid gaze on a world that, alas, isn’t as beautiful as they seem to want it to be.

There are moments when these ravishments come close to the touristic, though this is attenuated by the filmmakers’ unexpected use of the boxy Academy ratio. Here, this square framing has the old-fashioned quality of early still photographs, particularly in some of the opening scenes, which avoids the postcard-like associations these landscapes might have had in wide-screen. These early scenes are intoxicating, partly because it’s very pleasant to watch happy children just be happy together, and this is an especially stunning place to explore. Like Pietro, you are immediately plunged into the region’s splendors and mysteries, its densely sheltering foliage, enigmatically abandoned corners and dramatic, seemingly limitless vistas.

Like in many lifelong friendships, “In growing up, at the beginning you are just spending time together as kids, and time seems endless. But then things become more complicated, and you have to make an effort to be friends. And through the hardships of life, you have to know how to be there for one another,” she said.

Pietro hikes to a peak he and his father Giovanni reached decades ago and finds the summit book in which Giovanni had written on that occasion. In this and similar summit books on other mountain peaks he finds his father's experiences and feelings during hikes there with Pietro and Bruno and later with just Bruno. Later at dinner, Bruno and Lara argue over financial issues with her accusing him of having his head in the clouds. 15 years later, 31-year-old Pietro has found a job at a restaurant in Turin. One winter night, he receives a call from his mother that his father has died.

One night, Pietro tells him about a Nepalese he met who described how the world consists of eight circular mountain ranges divided by eight seas, and at the center of it all is Mount Meru, the tallest mountain. Pietro asks Bruno whether the person who has visited the eight mountains and eight seas is more learned than the person who has scaled Mount Meru. Bruno identifies himself as being on Mount Meru and Pietro claims to be visiting the eight mountains and that he is more knowledgeable.