building-a-house

The boxy aspect ratio squeezes the Alps into a portrait shape, which makes the peaks feel tall rather than wide. It also means the landscape never quite escapes the two men at the centre of it. All perfectly fine stylistic choices yet I still spent the first twenty minutes wishing someone would open the curtains.

Narratively it’s straightforward, and there’s no reward in coming for the plot. Two boys meet in Grana; one leaves, one stays; they build a house together decades later. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch let it run to 147 minutes and not all of that is essential. The Nepal digressions are interesting but you could skip one and lose nothing. What accumulates instead is a study of class and social mobility working itself out inside a friendship: Pietro’s family can afford to consider adopting Bruno, and that offer is the wound the rest of the film and their friendship circles.

The two of them see the world in completely incompatible ways and understand each other perfectly, which is a harder thing to dramatise than it sounds, and the leads Marinelli and Borghi do it mostly in silences. It builds to something genuinely affecting and it looks utterly beautiful.