Brokeback Mountain

I happened to see Brokeback mountain, from 2005. The director, Ang Lee, is from Taiwan and the Orientals, you know, hold back the feelings. Ang Lee had already demonstrated this characteristic in Sense and Sensibility, which I liked. I found Brokeback mountain beautiful and poignant, one of those films that when you go to bed you think about them, when you wake up you think about them, and for the whole day after the vision every frame remains in your mind, because they touch something inside you. In the case of this film, this happens without reason, without emphasis or redundancy. Everything is dry, essential, lean and therefore overwhelming, it is pure romance.

The love of the two cowboys is not beautiful because it is homosexual but because it is impossible, and therefore destined to last, to remain transcendent, not to clash with the immanence, boredom and meanness of everyday reality. Twenty years of overwhelming feeling, consumed only a few times, a deep and underground bond that goes beyond everything else, which, like true love, is not even jealous of everything else.

Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar have personal lives, have wives and children but do not make the other share in their lives. Maybe they don’t even call. They entrust their relationship to tickets that are sent a few times a year to meet at Brokeback Mountain, the magical place where they met for work and where their passion was born with no escape and no future. Even the landscape is part of the discourse of the sentiment: it is subdued as the gestures, like the dialogues, like the narration itself, it is beautiful but not spectacular, more than anything else it is true. Jack and Ennis love each other in the mountains, where they pretend to go fishing, their encounters and the place that favors them are isolated, detached from everything, but malice still manages to spy on them and reach them even there, without their knowledge. The mountain is a place of the soul, where you can eat around the fire, bathe in the icy rivers, do camaraderie for men, but with tenderness, with an indissoluble bond of body and spirit. The mountain remains unchanged, even when outside the world changes and modernizes but not to the point of accepting their relationship. When they are in Brokeback, Jack and Ennis also rejuvenate their appearance, they are the same as in that first unforgettable summer of 1963. While they are together they recreate the world, they are the world themselves and there is no place for anything else.

Jack is an extrovert, dreamer, he imagines a future that will lead him, however, only to death. Ennis is closed in his pain, attached to the normal image he wants to give of himself, to the point of macerating and canceling himself out in this useless effort, because distortion leads to reification and alienation.

The beginning and the end are a masterful, both under the banner of the unsaid. At the beginning there is an entire sequence shot in silence, the one in which the two men see each other for the first time, they watch each other without showing it, apparently not interested. In the finale, however, there is only one broken sentence: “Jack, I swear to you”, while the protagonist’s eyes stare at the postcard that represents the mountain of love. The rest is left to the viewer. “I swear to you that I will challenge the world to bring your ashes up there”, we think, “I swear to you that I will always love you and I will never forget you”, “I swear to you that I will live up to your love and what you wanted from me ”, of that hidden but violent feeling that pushed Jack to steal and keep forever the other’s clothes, a forbidden passion that never extinguishes, goes beyond family, children and even death.

In the middle there is a story told in a dry and linear way, without boring but without ever letting go of excess. The two men behave normally, they seem only colleagues or friends, but behind the unspoken there is a ferocious turmoil, an irresistible wave that overwhelms and upsets, which tears the fabric of normalcy, of “non-life” passed off for life, and overbearingly emerges during the scenes of passion, especially the kiss in the back of the house, witnessed by Ennis’ wife. Wives also participate in the unspoken, withheld, by moving forward pretending that the thing doesn’t exist because it is convenient, because talking would open up the abyss. The same applies to Jack’s death. Here too there is an underlying lie. It is Ennis who understands that the friend was killed because he was homosexual, although it is never explained by anyone.

A film made of words, gestures and things that are hidden yet explode; a romantic, passionate and wonderful love that made me cry and left me with something sweet, bitter and very sad.