The Bromance Movie
by Robert Crampton
The Eight Mountains is a classic arthouse film. Almost two and a half hours long, and yet nothing much happens. Foreign language with subtitles. Long, lingering, beautifully framed shots of trees. Extended sequences with no dialogue at all. Quirky soundtrack. A couple of up-and-coming talents in the lead roles. No guns, explosions, jokes or sex. Jury Prize at Cannes last year. It’s not so much that I would normally hate a film such as this, more that I just wouldn’t see it. Maybe, by accident, I’d come across it on the telly. But I certainly wouldn’t see it at the cinema, mostly because it simply would not cross my radar. It only did by accident, when a pal urged me so insistently to see it that I did. And now, in turn, I urge you to see it too.
The action, such as it is, starts in the summer of 1984, when two 11-year-old boys, both sole children in what we are given to suspect might be dysfunctional families, become friends in a remote, depopulated village in the Italian Alps, north of Turin. Pietro is a city boy on holiday. His father is a loyal company man who adores the hills yet works too hard to fulfil his dream of a rural life. Bruno is a proud montanaro, or highlander, from an old Piedmont clan. His dad has rejected his heritage and is away working as a bricklayer in northern Europe, while his uncle is struggling to keep the family cheese-making business going in the days when “artisanal” still meant “really hard work for very little reward”. The rest of the film tells the story of Pietro and Bruno’s friendship over the ensuing quarter-century or so.
● Yeehaw! Brokeback rides onto the West End stage
While Brokeback Mountain is an obvious influence, to reveal the extent of the similarity, one way or another, would count as a spoiler. Suffice to say, the cinematography is breathtaking, the camerawork so clear and crisp you are transported up on to those ridges and glaciers with the pals as they move from innocence through adolescence to full, luxuriously bearded, chunky-sweatered manhood. There is a lot of smoking, a fair amount of grappa, plenty of cheese and a refreshing amount of manual labour. Bruno grows up quickly; Pietro is a lost soul for a while. “His adult life started at 13,” Pietro says of his friend, “while at 31 I am still partly a boy.”
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The truly impressive element of The Eight Mountains is the sensitive, realistic, honest way that it handles male friendship. Far too often on screen bromances are depicted as odd-couple, love-hate, wisecracking bantz-ups. Or master and pupil coming-of-age sagas. Or we’ve-heard-the-chimes-at-midnight-together-I-love-ya-man buddyfests. The co-directors and co-writers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch avoid all those traps.
Bruno and Pietro have fun together, get drunk together and do various manly things together while wearing vests, but mostly, they simply like each other, are loyal to each other, are comfortable with each other. Their deep affection is understated, yet entirely relatable and believable. And calming, somehow. Over time they develop different skills and desires, yet these differences are not exaggerated. Bruno is not caricatured as a noble savage full of salty peasant wisdom, Pietro does not turn into a tortured artist. They understand each other, don’t make demands, don’t compete, don’t really get angry. Which is the way it has to be, if you’re going to stay close for a lifetime. I would have been happy to watch them for even longer than I did.
Of course it helps that both men are mesmerically hot, and that most of the film takes place in one of the most ravishing landscapes on the planet.
Pep Guardiola, style icon
by Harriet Walker
He is the lean and tidy tactical genius whose Man City squad are on course for a historic treble of the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League. Pep Guardiola, 52, is the most admired man in football: men want to look like him and their wives wish they did too.
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A Lorca among the linesmen, the Spanish manager has a pitchside look that is most often a shell jacket, jumper and jeans, all in fitted beatnik black. He has been a fan of rave-era streetwear brands such as Stone Island and earned maximum local cool points when he appeared in a “MDCR” sweatshirt that evoked the city’s Madchester past. Yet he is just as often to be found in the one per cent’s favourite off-duty uniform: poloneck, blazer and tailored trousers, like some Stanley Tucci or Steve Jobs of the beautiful game.
Guardiola recently joined an elite tier of celebrities with items of clothing named after them. Jane Birkin inspired the Hermès bag, Blake Lively a Christian Louboutin heel: Pep is the face that launched a £70 pair of cargo pants on the streetwear site beeinspiredclothing.com (think AsSeenOnScreen-era Asos but for footballers).
This isn’t his first time as a fashion plate: Guardiola, then a Barcelona player, strolled the catwalk for the Catalan designer Antonio Miró in the Nineties. While his manager Johan Cruyff was annoyed, Miró was not — everything Pep wore sold out immediately. Grab those cargos while you still can.
The hot novel
by Robbie Millen
When I finished reading Soldier Sailor I gave a shifty, red-eyed look around the café I was sitting in. Had anyone noticed my attack of the blubs? Claire Kilroy made me cry. The ending to her novel is beautiful, tender, noble even. A happy ending that makes you cry — surely that’s the best of both worlds.
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Soldier Sailor takes us inside the mind of a new mother who is not coping. The novel is addressed to her baby, Sailor, who is setting out on the voyage of life, by the narrator who sees herself as a wounded soldier. Baby never stops crying, and she’s so tired, so frazzled. The husband, who hides at work, is useless (or is he? There’s plenty going on to kick-start a hundred book club discussions). Will it ever get better?
● Soldier Sailor review — the best 30 pages of fiction you’ll read this year
Oh no, you might think, not another moany novel about motherhood. Worry not: Kilroy, an Irish novelist, makes a well-trodden subject feel original. Soldier Sailor combines literary skill (it’s my early bet for the Booker prize) with warmth, humour and wicked observations of everyday life — check out the set-piece scenes navigating the horrorscape of an Ikea, or driving fast, angry and late to a party: “he leaned forward to peer at the Micra driver as we sped past, for the steering wheel that crowned him king of the road revealed the decrepitude of others. The Steering Wheel of Truth.”
On nearly every page there was a sentence or an observation that I wanted to underline because it was funny, lovely or real. Stuffing a dummy in a screaming baby’s mouth is “like putting a pin back into a grenade. The explosion was sucked back in.” “Dishwasher juice was trapped in the hollow yellowing teat [of a soother]. You sampled it like a sommelier.” And isn’t this a lovely description of a playground? “Little kids bolted around in all directions, their skulls narrowly missing one another. It was the Hadron Collider in there.”
Sexy sheds
by Victoria Brzezinski
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Forget the man cave! Sexy sheds are top of the garden lust list. Ultimate outhouse inspiration comes courtesy of Beata Heuman, the interior designer with a penchant for bombastic pattern and print. She packs a serious punch within the walls of her 2m x 3m shed (built by the previous owners of her west London pad), housing a loveseat upholstered in her favourite Pierre Frey chintz and a daybed covered in her own Asteria’s Folly fabric. Inside, the ceiling and panelling are painted in postbox red and a floor-to-ceiling hand-stamped monochrome leaf motif. Her shed mantra? Fun is in, practicality is out. “Lean into the fantasy of it,” she urges.
Meanwhile, Richard Christiansen’s goat shed in Los Angeles, a former goatherder’s cabin built in the 1930s, has been luxxed-up with de Gournay wallpaper and Hermès dining chairs.
For mellower tastes, the garden designer and shed guru Joel Bird (theshedbuilder.co.uk) has designed more than 100 bespoke wooden creations, from budget-friendly writer’s rooms to a Derek Jarman-inspired shed with charred shou sugi ban-style cladding and bright yellow window frames, based on Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent. In Bird’s Margate garden, his shed features an allotment on its roof and an ingenious irrigation system. And if you fancy DIYing your own, turn to the shed-fluencer Erika Kotite, the author of She Shed Living, for thrifty tips on turning scrap building materials into chic sheds.
The Vermeer film
by Hilary Rose
If, like me, you never take the audio guide at art exhibitions then Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition is a revelation. I’m doing both of them a disservice there. I just find audio guides distracting, and this film is much, much more than they could offer. You may be one of the lucky few with tickets to the real thing, but what the rest of us get is the best talking heads around: the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the exhibition’s curator, and an assortment of eminent art historians, experts and conservators. They explain what we’re looking at, why it’s brilliant and how Johannes Vermeer painted it. It reminds me of one of my lockdown mainstays, Cocktails with a Curator, where experts from the Frick Collection mixed a cocktail and talked in detail about one of the items in the museum. This film takes us through pretty much Vermeer’s entire oeuvre and gives us the lowdown, even though we know tantalisingly little about himself and nothing at all about his models.
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● Couldn’t get tickets to the Vermeer exhibition? There’s another way
There are close-ups that take you far closer than you’d be allowed to get in person: the glint of a single gold coin in The Procuress, the glowing highlight on a pearl earring that’s just a dab of white paint, but yeesh, what a dab. An awestruck conservator talks about the magic of working on a Vermeer, small and vulnerable out of its frame. They explain something I would never have noticed in the flesh: how a cloud in View of Delft casts a shadow over the buildings in the foreground but not those at the back. We speculate about who commissioned The Geographer and my money is on some bigwig in the Dutch East India Company.
Is this film, as some say, the best seat in the house? No. The best seat is obviously the one right in front of the actual painting. Nothing will ever beat that. In an ideal world, you’d see both. Failing that, watch this.
Boob tubes
by Hannah Rogers
You’ll have to lift more than hand weights to pull off the style set’s hot top this summer — your cleavage might also need some gravity-defying help. Straps (and, by extension, bras) are considered passé for fashionistas now: they are hailing the return of the boob tube.
Carrie Bradshaw wore them in the Nineties; so did Victoria Beckham when she was still known as Posh. In 2023 the strapless, clingy bandeau is back and so are the items it was famously worn with the first time round: cargo pants, hoop earrings, baguette bags and heels.
That look has been spotted on front rows at recent fashion shows from New York to Copenhagen. Gen Z love it too (videos tagged with “Zara boobtube” have been watched 1.9 million times on TikTok). The glossy posse thinks their boob tubes look great with tailoring, too: think sleek slacks, slingbacks and blazers.
That’s the styling I’d support if you want to try one yourself. It’s a personal preference how much you need elsewhere.
Sober dating
by Hannah Evans
Tall? Tick. Dark? Tick. Handsome? Tick. Likes a drink? Ick. For an emerging wave of single people, DUI (dating under the influence) is a turn-off. Some of them are even lumping it in the same category as smoking — a vice universally acknowledged as unhealthy and, quite frankly, a bit gross. On TikTok, searches for the term “alcohol is new cigarettes” has more than 13 million views and there are hundreds of videos on the app comparing the two. According to research by the dating app Tinder, almost three quarters of people who use the app have stated on their profile they either don’t drink or only have the occasional one.
● I gave ‘sober dating’ a go — here’s what I learnt
Now I want to blame this trend on Gen Z — they seem to be responsible for most things that seem strange to anyone aged 28 and above (millennials and older). But among my group of girlfriends who are in their late twenties and alcohol enthusiasts, four out of six of us — myself included — have recently dated sober men. “I like it because I can trust my intuition,” says my friend Maeve. “Alcohol usually clouds it. But if we’re both not drinking, I can trust my gut much more. If I had fun it’s because there was a vibe, not because the margaritas at the bar were great.”
Food festivals
by Hannah Evans
So you’re not going to Glastonbury. Not because you missed out on the ballot but because you know that this summer, the hottest festival to go to is a food festival — and they’re just as tricky to get tickets to. Summer Camp is a “luxury micro festival” in north Wales taking place across four weekends in July; food is the headlining act — this summer Olia Hercules, a Ukrainian chef and author, is the main event — and there are just 125 tickets, which means you would probably have better luck getting into Glasto.
Lost Village is a four-day food and music festival in a secluded woodland in Lincolnshire where the line-up includes world-famous DJs and Michelin-star chefs who will cook forest feasts. You’ve got a greater chance of nabbing a ticket here — there are 18,000 but it’s still “intimate”: 210,000 will be at Glastonbury this year. Don’t want to camp? Yoxman is a three-day food festival at the 8,000-acre Wilderness Reserve estate in Suffolk. You’ll stay in luxury cottages and manors on the grounds, while Michelin-star chefs such as Michel Roux and Angela Harnett do the cooking. The catch: you’ll have to wait until next summer to go; probably a good thing considering tickets start at £2,750 for two people.
