Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee, 2005, USA / Canada, Colour, 134 mins, Certificate: 15

This June the world celebrates Pride. In other words it honours the colourful (in every meaning of the word) diversity of being human. And this is an excellent, albeit not the only reason to (re)introduce you to a modern, yet timeless cinematic classic.

So on Thursday 27 June, a day before the Stonewall Riots anniversary, we salute both that landmark event for the gay (and LGBT) community’s rights as well as the local and international Pride celebrations with Ang Lee’s masterful extraordinary Western, “Brokeback Mountain”.

An irresistible and unforgettable, multi-award winning film that tenderly details the unlikely, clandestine romance between two cowboys through the years, featuring 4 heart-breaking performances by Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Ann Hathaway and the late, dearly missed Heath Ledger.

Nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Picture (which notoriously, unexpectedly lost to “Crash”), it won 3: Best Director for Lee, Best Adapted Screenplay for the thoughtful and fertile way Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana translated Annie Proulx short story for the big screen, and Best Original Score for Gustavo Santaolalla hauntingly emotive music.

But forget the awards. The significance of this film exists in its ability to disarmingly communicate not only how totally gender-blind love can be, but also reality’s inability to live up to what desire conjures up in the mind and plants in the heart.

Reviews:

★★★★ “Ang Lee’s unmissable… Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It’s a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who bring deep reserves of feeling to this defiantly erotic love story about two Wyoming ranch hands and the external and internal forces that drive them from desire to denial. Directed with piercing intelligence and delicacy by Lee, the film of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story — the unerring script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana is a model of literary adaptation — wears its emotions on its sleeve… It’s an eye-opener.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

★★★★★ “Here is a love story from director Ang Lee in which the taboo word “love” is never spoken. In fact the whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name – and doing so with superb intelligence and magnificent candour… [It] is the story of how most of our lives, gay and straight, are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally right, … but which is then infected by the bacilli of wrongness. Ennis and Jack, flawed as they are, do their best to resist the encroachment of that infection; they fight not just against bigotry, but dullness and mediocrity. Their story is not tragic, but heroic.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story… [It is] actually a serious piece of art in which great joy can be taken in witnessing the small-miracle performances of Ledger (so eloquent in his mute despair) and Gyllenhaal (so meticulously agonized by his daily compromises). Ang Lee conveys maddening delirium rendered in the way one man’s eyes gaze at another’s, and then look away, and the looking-away amounts to the murder of two souls as surely as if they’d drawn guns and hit each other in the heart.” Ken Tucker  New York Magazine