I am desperate to see Brokeback Mountain.
It’s just a movie, and it’s certainly not my story. And yet, it can’t help but be my story.
I have read everything I can find about the film, watched the trailer a dozen times, and I actually check rottentomatoes on a daily basis, looking for affirmation. "Yes it is a good film," I want to hear them say.
Please, let it be a good film.
See, I believe in this movie. Not just because Ang Lee has directed the other most beautiful film ever, but because when I read "Love Is A Force Of Nature" in that context the hair on my neck stands up, and I can tell that even my skin agrees. Ignoring the toil and sacrifice that relationships take, love is the thing.
It’s the thing that matters, that leaves its aura like a residue on mountain paths, in buildings, songs, and on yesterday’s shirt. Have you ever felt it in a place you've never been before? That the place had been blessed by love?
There are three things I need from Brokeback Mountain. I need to it be the story it is purported to be; a love between two men that is beautiful and complex and tragic, as love often is. I need it to make me feel. To make me cry the way movies are supposed to when you relate to the characters. And I need it to show the world – or at least the willing – that I'm not so different or aberrant after all.
I read a hopeful review that said this film is so powerful that it could change our national dialogue about what it is to be gay. And I longed for it to be true.
But I worry that, in the public's eye, no amount of Ang Lee's mastery can legitimize this as anything other than a gay film. The most I can hope is that it’s a sleeper hit – critically acclaimed to such a degree that cinema buffs see it even if they’re uneasy about the subject matter. That women go to see it, as the studio is hoping, and maybe they see themselves in one of these men, loving someone impossible.
Maybe they feel that ache in their chest, the ache they remember as a longing for someone they cannot have. Maybe, in this way, they relate. Because that could change everything.
But I'm not counting on it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Did you read the story that came first? It's by Annie Proulx, from her first book of 'Wyoming Stories'. It's a great story. When I first read it, I thought, "Oh, it would take someone who's already a success to get this published in the New Yorker." If anyone else had written it, I doubt it would have received so much attention. The story almost shows them fucking, it's that close, she actually lets you smell it. If a gay man had written it, it would have been dismissed as 'gay fiction'. Good for her, I say. If you haven't looked at 'Wyoming Stories' you should get a copy. It's sharp.
I would have, of course, because I'm like that. But I hadn't heard of it till I first read of the movie. And I didn't want to ruin the film by reading the story and being let down by the screenplay adaptation. I'll be much more satisfied if I *love* the film and then read the story to find out it's even better. :)
Post a Comment