Pietro, the restless, openhearted city boy who narrates “The Eight Mountains,” a tender story about love and friendship, is 11 years old when the movie begins. By the time he is in his early 30s, he is a man with a full beard and an inconsequential résumé. A sensitive, charismatic melancholic, Pietro is unattached and existentially unsettled. Cut off from his past and uncertain about the future, he suffers from a familiar contemporary complaint that this story restively circles without naming, one that looks a lot like the modern condition.
Based on a slender, celebrated 2016 novel by the Italian writer Paolo Cognetti, “The Eight Mountains” tracks Pietro across both decades and continents, charting his life through the intense friendship that he makes in childhood with Bruno. They first meet in the summer of 1984, when Pietro’s parents — the family lives in Turin — rent an apartment in a village in the Aosta Valley, a shockingly beautiful swathe of the Italian Alps that borders both France and Switzerland. There, nestled among velvety green slopes and towered over by jagged, soaring peaks, Pietro finds a friend, an ally, a role model and, in time, a sense of belonging.
For both boys, their friendship proves a soul-sustaining connection, one that begins with them dubiously eyeing each other in Pietro’s dark, claustrophobic holiday home but that rapidly shifts once they dash outside. They walk, race and tumble through the area, exploring and sharing. 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.
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. Whether they’re poking about a derelict building or rushing through an enveloping tunnel of green, and even when they’re just chatting, trading helpful morsels of information — Pietro’s father works as an engineer at a large factory — the two remain visually tethered to the material world.
