‘The Eight Mountains’: Nauseating Metaphors Invade This Overlong Italian Snooze-Fest [Cannes]

Almost every year a handful of terrible films are put into Cannes competition. I really hope this year it’s just “The Eight Mountains.”

Directed by Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen (“Beautiful Boy”) and Charlotte Vandermeersch, here is a film so dramatically inert that you almost feel as if its mountainous setting has sucked the oxygen right out of you.

The film is based on Paolo Cognetti’s Italian novel of the same name. It’s a coming-of-age tale spanning 30 years and tackling a bromance between two Italian boys — one, named Pietro (Luca Marinelli), who is the son of a chemist, the other, Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), of a stonemason. They used to spend their childhoods together in a secluded Alpine village only to have their paths significantly diverge over time.

Many years later, they reconnect in the same place and, out of sheer harmony, decided to build a cabin together high atop a mountain. Yes, it’s the building-a-house-as-a-metaphor trope and Van Groeningen has no shame hammering it down our throats.

Pietro also lives with the guilt of telling his dad one day to fuck off and then having him die of a heart attack not too long after their fight. His father’s dream was to build the aforementioned cabin in the very exact location our two protagonists are doing it.

Eventually, Pietro replaces the Italian alps for a newfound love of the Himalayas, Bruno continues on without him, but not without losing a piece of himself in the process. It’s all very flat and joyless as a piece of cinema.

Clocking in at a pummelling 145 minutes, the film is narrated by an older Pietro and it only makes the whole experience more heavy-handed. Sure, Marinelli and Borghi have fantastic chemistry and there are some awe-struck shots of vast mountainous peaks, but what exactly is the point of telling this story? There’s nothing original being tackled here. [D]