Surrounded by the eternal sunshine sold over the counters this time of the year, I often remember a few writers, film makers, song writers who tapped into the deep, dark, swirling complexity of human relationships and showed us stuff that does not come wrapped in golden paper with a bow on top. One of the most moving comments on the human condition with or without love was the film Brokeback Mountain. I remember watching it as a reviewer in a multiplex packed with jeers and cat calls. Yes, India is not ready for a love like that in a public space. The wrenching scene in Onir’s I Am where a cop emotionally and physically abuses a gay man is not far from truth. We still associate love with a connection between opposite genders and yet, I came back home heavy with tragedy after watching Brokeback Mountain because it really is a universal story.
Ang Lee’s masterful, unsparing gaze at love and life is about the unspent pain of snuffed out lives in a box. The boxes can be different. They can be made of long silences and long, unbreakable chains of unsaid things. Of denial. Of fear. But no matter what they are made of, most of us choose to live in them rather than risk a life of brave choices.
Brokeback Mountain remains one of the most truthful and brave films and it reminds us just how fragile and how strong and how invincible true love can be. “I wish I knew how to quit you,’’says Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal ) to Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger ), the man he has loved passionately and hopelessly for over 20 years. “Why don’t you?’’ snaps back Ennis, not knowing how imminent the end is for a story that began two decades back on the staggeringly beautiful slopes of a mountain.
A casual bond forged over bonfire meals of simmering baked beans, turns out to be the most momentous and irrevocable “thing’’ that grabs two men when they are thrown together by chance to oversee and protect a few thousand sheep. And like them, even we cannot see it coming. Director Ang Lee does not hurry the story and paints the screen with sloping acres sheathed in green fur and white wool, the colours of rain and snow and streams and rolling clouds.
Like a merciless sorcerer, he is weaving an unforgettable web of beauty that the two men will never forget or break free from as long as they live. As the sheep spectacularly roll down the hills in white waves, the men hunt and cook, kill coyotes, share stories and chores and grow closer. We see Jack wistfully looking at the curling smoke rising from Ennis’ campsite when the two are apart but neither the men nor we are ready when some dormant force erupts one night and changes their camaraderie into a love that brands their souls and their lives forever. Ofcourse they don’t know it yet because they wake up the next morning to say, “This is a one shot thing that is going on here.’’
Ennis is the taciturn baritone of reason, unwilling to be considered “queer,’’ reared up on the doctrine of heaven and hell and the memory of a man who was dismembered and killed because he was gay. He cannot forgive Jack (the one more open to hurt because he takes his chances in love without heeding the consequences) for initiating intimacy. And yet, it is Ennis who grows violent with pain and anger when Jack says goodbye. It is Ennis who hides his face in his hat and goes down on his knees and cries when the two go their separate ways. They leave the mountain and its memories behind but the mountain does not leave them. By this time, they have developed a life-long hunger for each other that can neither be sated nor denied.
Ennis gets married, minds babies when he can and picks up fights with men who dare to sully his daughters’ ear with swear words. He is a good husband and father and yet four years later, when he receives a postcard from Jack and hears his truck come up his drive way, he bounds down the stairs towards the one man he can be himself with, the one man who can make him feel whole. Jack is married too by now and the two men try to fit into two impossible situations, hurting each other, their families and themselves as they snatch time for clandestine fishing trips.
As Ennis grows more and more distant from everyone in his life and Jake grows bitter and is forced to find comfort with other men, we see that the worst betrayal is the one we inflict upon ourselves. This masterful love story by Ang Lee is both languid and suddenly violent. Yes, it is about the improbable, forbidden love between two men but it is also about us. It is about the futility of denying your soul its share of joy and also about the consequences of following your heart in a world where to kill is easier than to love.
Brokeback Mountain is based on Annie Proulx’s short story and the leading men suck us into the seething hells of their souls while the women (Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway) change into hard and cold versions of the vibrant, passionate women they once were. But this film finally is the triumph of a filmmaker who has turned a gay love story into a universal plea for self-expression. In their last meeting, when Jack tells Ennis in desperate fury, something to the effect of,“Do you know how hard life gets?” He does not get an answer but we know exactly what he means.
Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri