Robeco Filmdag: Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming, where forty years ago cowboys and shepherds led the same life as the generations before them. Talkative Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the surly Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are two ‘drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken’, in the words of writer Annie Proulx, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her short story from 1997. Eight years later, Ang Lee was to win the Golden Lion in Venice with his film version, the co-writers of which included Larry ‘Last Picture Show’ McMurtry. Brokeback Mountain is above all a universal love story and only in the second place a ‘gay Western’. Lee takes time with this drama, in which the isolation of the grand and lonely landscape of Brokeback Mountain, where the two kids spend a summer looking after sheep, has a liberating effect. There is room for feelings that would normally be suppressed by the ruling social order. But at the end of the season, the men go their separate ways, looking for work and a life. Both start families: one with his school sweetheart, the other with a Texan girl with business acumen. When Jack finally sends a card to say he is back in Wyoming, their tragic love story starts again – doomed to fleeting encounters during fishing trips in the wilderness. (GT)