This year’s three-time Oscar winner, Brokeback Mountain, was first shown in Oulu last month. Li Quing reviews the film.

I read Annie Proulx’s affecting short story, written in a rough cowboy English, two days before I saw the film. On Brokeback Mountain, two country boys meet and fall in love. In Proulx’s description the mountain is cold, windy and isolated. But Ang Lee, director of films such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, turns a wild, unforgiving landscape into somewhere where bluebirds sing over a whisky spring.

It starts in Wyoming 1963 as neither Jack nor Ennis are twenty. Lonely and isolated, shepherding life makes them fall in love. Remote Brokeback Mountain becomes their Eden: they drink near the campfire, sing during the cold night, embrace under blue sky, and fight until they have to seperate. Later they marry and have kids, but still love each other passionately; meet one or twice in a year, but never really live together. Desperate after twenty years, they find that the only thing they have is the time on Brokeback Mountain.

“There is a Brokeback Mountain in each person’s heart,” said Ang Lee, after shooting the film. “Someone is on the way there, but for someone it is a place that never can return.” By this definition, Brokeback Mountain is the most beautiful place in your psyche – a dream that contains all your precise memories and everything you yearn for.

Ennis Del Mar, in the film, spends the golden time of his life there, a time he daren’t face. He tells Jack–as if to himself –“if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

In 1960s Wyoming, “gay” meant big shame for cowboys. A young Ennis sees a gay killed by his father in an irrigation ditch, and has nightmares. When Jack dies in an accident, Ennis goes to Jack’s small bedroom and finds his own shirt hiding carefully inside Jack’s shirt, realising his own heart. But it's too late: of the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain, nothing’s left but the shirts in his hand. In the end of the film, Ennis hangs them in his closet, carefully putting his over Jack’s shirt, swearing as a couple in wedding.

Jack has more initiative. He finds Ennis after four years’ separation, and proposes that they own a little ranch and live together. He drives joyously from Texas to see Ennis on hearing that Ennis is divorced. But, as ever, the results are disappointing. He is angry at Ennis’ hesitation, but doesn’t know how to quit him. The embrace in the distant summer on Brokeback Mountain kept his hope alive for more than twenty years. For him, death is a final extrication from this resultless love.

Emmylou Harris’ song, “a love that will never grow old,” ends a great film about a sorrowful love that can never return.