Brokeback Mountain in Singapore

source: Associated Press, Straits Times, 'Today' newspaper

15 February 2006
The Associated Press

'Brokeback Mountain' to Open Uncut in Singapore, Which Bans Gay Sex
by Gillian Wong

Singapore cinemas will begin screening the movie "Brokeback Mountain" on Thursday in what critics say is a sign of loosening censorship in a country that bans gay sex.

"This shows they are willing to give more scope for homosexuality to be examined as an issue in popular culture," said Russell Heng, founder of People Like Us, a gay support group. However, he said the loosening of censorship regulations has been slow.

"Brokeback Mountain," a movie about two cowboys swept up in a love affair, is the front-runner at the March 5 Academy Awards in Los Angeles with eight nominations. The movie led the Jan. 16 Golden Globes with four wins, among them best dramatic film and best director for Ang Lee.

In Singapore, Lee's uncut film will be restricted to audiences over age 21, and promotional material carries a consumer advisory saying "Mature theme, sexual scenes."

Gay sex, defined by the Southeast Asian city-state as "an act of gross indecency," is punishable by a maximum of two years in jail. There have been few prosecutions.

Amy Chua, director of media content at the state Media Development Authority, said the Board of Film Censors allowed "Brokeback Mountain" to be screened because the film did not "promote or glamorize the lifestyle."

"As the entire film focuses on and revolves round the issue of homosexuality, the Board of Film Censors decided to rate it R21," she said in a statement.

"The aim is to provide adults with more choices while ensuring that the young are not exposed to content that is not intended for them," Chua said.

Singapore has in recent years relaxed censorship regulations for films and plays in an effort to loosen up and market itself as a media and arts center. But controls remain tight.

The popular Taiwanese movie "Formula 17," about two teenage boys falling in love, was banned in 2004 after regulations had been revised. The government said the Taiwanese movie was banned because it showed homosexuality as "normal, and a natural progression of society."

Singapore's censors also have cut scenes from films, such as one depicting two women kissing in the 2002 award-winning "The Hours," which starred Nicole Kidman.

Wong Lung Hsiang, a film critic and secretary of the Singapore Film Society, said authorities were gradually loosening controls.

"I think Singapore's view is that people in the heartland don't object to showcasing films with these themes _ even if they don't necessarily accept the lifestyle," Wong said. "Also, 'Brokeback Mountain' by today's standards is not very controversial. The two characters suffer a lot, the film is very tragic, it wins sympathy from the audience.

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15 February 2006
Straits Times, Life! section

Ain't no mountain higher
By Ong Sor Fern, Film Correspondent

You cannot choose who you fall in love with and Lee Ang's movie about two gay cowboys is a masterclass in film-making, even as it shows the endurance of love and thwarted desires 

A lot of Brokeback Mountain happens in the wide open spaces of Wyoming. But the story is really all about enclosures. 

In fact, for a movie set in big sky country, it feels downright claustrophobic. 

And that is a compliment to this quiet film, which has been nominated for eight Oscars. In its deliberate pacing and spare style, it dares to trust the audience will follow where the story leads. 

Director Lee Ang's tender adaptation does justice to E. Annie Proulx's unsentimental 1997 short story about two gay cowboys.

Here, credit must be given to the terse Oscar-nominated script by novelist Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. They spin out Proulx's evocative 55-page story into a two-hour feature while staying astonishingly true to both its plot and its sensibility. 

In the summer of 1963, monosyllabic Ennis del Mar (Best Actor contender Heath Ledger) and the more voluble Jack Twist (Best Supporting Actor nominee Jake Gyllenhaal) are ranch hands who bond over baked beans, whiskey and a campfire on Brokeback mountain. 

But one night, when the weather turns frosty, they share a tent and more. Their sexual union is shot discreetly, cloaked in the shadows. 

The next morning, Ennis grunts, 'I'm no queer' and Jack replies, 'Me neither'. Yet they have sex again and again.

They part company when the summer ends. 

Ennis gets hitched to Alma (Best Supporting Actress nominee Michelle Williams), they have two daughters and life is a hard slog. Jack, meanwhile, marries pampered rodeo princess Lureen (Anne Hathaway in a breakout performance) and has a son.

But it is evident that neither man can forget the other. When Jack sends a postcard to Ennis four years later and they meet, their bottled feelings erupt in a passionate embrace.

Unable to deny each other, they continue to meet sporadically on hunting and fishing trips. The 20-year affair both sustains and destroys them as well as the people around them.

Alma, who sees the couple's tempestuous kiss, is shattered. Lureen, though unaware, matures into tight brittleness without ever fully understanding the causes of her husband's neglect. 

People and desires 

THIS movie will be beloved by film students and teachers in years to come as a masterclass in film-making. 

Every directorial decision, from the visual language to pacing and editing, is made with clear-eyed vision and cinematic intelligence.

While this may suggest a certain cool calculation, Lee never forgets that his stories are about people and their thwarted desires. His all-embracing empathy means there is melancholy and regret, but no rancour nor recriminations, that feels all the more devastating because of its quietude.

The masterfully languid opening sets the restrained tone. A truck reduced to the size of a toy travels across a yawning landscape of green hills to the twang of an acoustic guitar.

The introduction of the two main characters takes place in a five-minute silent sequence - an eternity in screen time - carried solely by the stars' performances.

The actors deserve all the praise. Ledger disappears under the tough skin of the anguished, guttural Ennis. His childhood memory of a gay man bashed to death prevents him from trying for happiness with Jack. 

Gyllenhaal maximises his liquid puppy dog eyes to convey Jack's open vulnerability, which morphs from youthful hope to middle-aged weariness and despair.

One can quibble that these two poster-beautiful actors are far from Proulx's gnarled, weatherbeaten ranch hands. 

In the story, Jack is short, bucktoothed and a bit portly. Ennis is even further from the hunky Ledger, with Proulx describing him as possessing a 'high-arched nose and narrow face, a little cave-chested, with a small torso, and long, caliper legs'. 

Besides this departure, the women who remained mainly in the background in the story are allowed more screentime in this film version.

This makes all the difference to the film. Williams and Hathaway's sympathetic portrayals make clear that they are neither judge nor jury, but also victims of a society which defines love in strictly exclusive terms.

The women provide crucial context for what is really a tragedy about the gay man's experience of the closet.

Ennis and Jack have grown up in a society which allows no room for alternative gender orientations. Unable to give voice to their very essence, unlike a straight couple who can get married, have children and live together, their relationship instead poisons everything around them. 

The women in their lives are wrecked, sometimes without knowing why.

The most powerful scene in the movie draws directly from the book's most poignant image. 

Ennis finds a pair of shirts in Jack's closet - an old shirt he thought he had lost is tucked neatly into Jack's shirt. These two inanimate objects, wrapped in an embrace their owners cannot acknowledge in public, convey more than words the tragedy of lives spent, literally and metaphorically, in the closet.

The reason Brokeback Mountain has been hailed as such a breakthrough is precisely because the scriptwriters and Lee have depicted such a central gay experience in the language of straight romantic cinema.

It is no accident that the movie's poster, with the two leads posed pensively against each other, recalls the poster for Titanic. 

Casting pretty actors to play doomed lovers also follows the long-standing Hollywood tradition of putting beautiful people on the big screen to suffer in the name of passion. 

The rowdy sex play in the story, described as 'quick, rough, laughing and snorting', is translated tactfully onscreen in the arty equivalent of soft-focus photography.

Lee's restraint in presenting such a potentially explosive story plays a big part in the movie's success.

But some reviewers have also criticised this aspect of the film. Ezine Salon.com, for example, noted that 'the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive'.

But the movie's singular lack of stridency partly explains why it has not generated as much controversy as it might have.

In fact, other than the usual conservative grumbles and one Utah cinema which banned the movie from its halls, Brokeback has been making headlines more as a spectacular commercial success. 

The US$14 million (S$22.7 million) independent film opened on only five screens in the United States on Dec 11 before expanding slowly and steadily through word of mouth and prize buzz. So far, it has made US$51 million.

In a relatively weak year for films, with small independents garnering all the positive reviews despite flaws, Brokeback is also ahead of the pack in terms of all-around achievement in writing, directing and acting.

More than that, the movie's liberal slant and humane tenor make it one of those movies which liberals love.

As the Chicago Reader newspaper's caustic critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, commented: 'This is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity.'

But this opinion does an injustice to Lee's very palpable achievements in the movie, although one does suspect the film has attracted more than its fair share of raves because it is the perfect pop cultural success story to flaunt in the face of President George W. Bush's conservatism.

To be fair to Lee, he did not make the movie with the intention of becoming a cultural lodestone.

All this sound and fury is rather ironic considering the film at the centre of this brouhaha is all about understatement.

Brokeback makes its case for inclusion with such lowkey gravity that it packs more of a wallop than any soapbox rant ever can.

Its hushed heart will make this an enduring, if minor, classic in the film canon in time to come. 


Brokeback Mountain is nominated for eight Oscars in the following categories: 
Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, 
Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, 
Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture,
Best Cinematography and Best Music. 

The Oscars will be held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on March 5.

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15 February 2006
Straits Times, Life! section

Once I had a secret love
by Tay Yek Keak 

A straight guy like me wept buckets at this movie about the sweet romance between two cowboys. Er, any girl fancy the shirt off my back?

I cried. At the end of Brokeback Mountain, I broke down.

Let me tell you this. I haven't cried at movies where boy breaks up with girl. Not even when boy breaks up with girl and the dog dies, the car is repossessed and the ship sinks.

I haven't cried when one gender aches for another gender so much it hurts in the cold, lonely nights. 

I didn't even shed a tear when it happened to me. But this story, about two men who loved one another to pieces - it really moved me.

I need to clarify my credentials first.

Throughout my years of chummy camaraderie with my fellow men, in school, in the office, in the army, in the toilet at the football stadium, and on the one occasion I went fishing, anywhere, I've never felt an impulse to share anything with a guy in a bodily sense except maybe drink from the same can of Coke. 

I'm as straight as an arrow. 

But Brokeback Mountain has touched the liberal core in me, the part which says that ultimately what a person wants is entirely up to him whether it is pink, green, blue or Martian.

Sure I make the jokes about different kinds of people and I snigger at their ways, but the movie has humanised its subjects with such a beautiful, fatalistic love story I would probably, I hope, become a better man out of it. 

It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a gay movie for straight people. 

As I was watching the show, I kept messaging a friend to say that I have never seen two huggy, kissy fellas so happy together before.

Not even when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon won an Oscar together.

Here is where the idealised magic of cinema comes into play.

Lee Ang, the Hollywood outsider from Taiwan, that masterly auteur of the introspective, has said that in looking for the outsiders in his movie, he stopped casting once he saw Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal together.

Partnered up, they are Greek gods in Stetsons. Paired up, they are truly terrific actors. 

Young, handsome, rangy, strapping and equal in height, they are the Marlboro Men not so much of cigarettes, but of the morning after pill.

A friend, who loved the film as much as I do, wondered if she would feel so much for it if it were about two old geezers in less photogenic heat.

She doubted it. Those two bucks are exactly the sort of guys I would want to look like or at least be with to corral the chicks in.

But they have eyes only for each other. 

Love is a strange, unpredictable thing. It is already tough enough to read into the deep mysteries of girls, it's well nigh impossible to probe into two fellas' hidden, unspoken feelings.

In watching the shyer, repressive Ledger react to the more openly expressive Gyllenhaal, there is a mournful recognition of fate as well as a joyful celebration of the unexplained.

What they have, pointedly etched on their faces and the looks they give out of their forbidden confinement, is something that literally has no word for it. 

In this tale of sad intimate destiny and sadder ultimate consequence, in the way you'd believe a man can fly in Superman, you'd believe the tender mercy of love soaring here.

Longing and loss are such erratic vagaries in life. They are completely out of our hands. If you are of a certain age, as I am, you would see Brokeback as wistful nostalgia.

You would need to understand regret and imperfection, and to regret the imperfection of perfection. 

That every time Ledger's character Ennis Del Mar looks away and refuses to articulate in words the soul of his feelings, he is verbalising the fear of uncertainty and the pain of tentativeness.

I am moved by all this because it is so human and so believable. 

Lee Ang understands tentativeness. He understands the tentativeness that comes from not knowing what is going to happen the next day, the next time.

That's why, as he has explained in interviews, when you see the show, the first act of love between both men is about passion.

The second is about commitment.

It's a commitment that slow-burns two decades in the story, able to rear its flourish only when given the rare chance to, a factor that sways you to feel pensively for these guys.

Suppression is such an emotive force. 

Despite the hurt that it causes to the families in the story around them, it is an emotion blameless where men meant for each other only have the shirt in the closet to remember themselves by.

This groundbreaking film about manly, lonesome gay cowboys, thunderous in its daring, has made me look inward.

It actually makes me, as I write this on Valentine's Day, want to look for a girl to give a shirt to.

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17 February 2006
'Today' newspaper, 'plus' section

Cowboy crush
by Jeanine Tan

The hype is overwhelming, but are critics smitten with the film or what it represents? 

When Brokeback Mountain was released in Singapore yesterday, it rode into cinemas in a blaze of glory.

The film won big at the Golden Globes last month, roping in the awards for Best Drama and Best Director for Ang Lee, and it leads the list of nominees for next month's Academy Awards, with eight nods including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for star Heath Ledger. 

The major critics all love the film and almost everyone whether straight or gay, man or woman, has heard of it, if only as "that gay cowboy film".

On the strength of hype alone, Brokeback Mountain is this year's version of The Passion of the Christ, a film that has sparked so much controversy before its release that word of mouth alone guarantees it a huge audience.

But here is where Brokeback is different: The build-up has reached the point where it seems wrong not to have something good to say about the film.

Last month, Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss coined the term "the Brokeback breakthrough" to describe the phenomenon. 

The film has entered the mainstream consciousness unlike any other movie in recent memory. 

"Brokeback has managed to carry the lustre of its daring, as one of the rare Hollywood movies that are frank about gay sexuality, without provoking the sustained ire of social and political conservatives," he said.

It is comments like this that make one wonder if perhaps the critics adore the film more for what it represents, than what it is really like. 

you mean, some critics didn't like the film?

Take a closer look at the Brokeback phenomenon and you'll find a small number of dissenting voices. But those voices barely register as a squeak when compared to the roar of approval from everyone else. 

Film critic Gene Shalit of the US talk show Today called it "wildly overpraised, but not by me". But what drew the most attention were his supposedly anti-gay comments. 

Shalit called Jake Gyllenhaal's character a "sexual predator" who "tracks Ennis down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts".

In a review on Salon.com, critic Stephanie Zacharak suggested that Brokeback is a "closeted movie". 

"Lee and his actors give us the occasional snapshot of intimacy, but that's not the same as wrapping us in its glow, or making us feel the danger of it in our bones," she writes. "This is an unconventional love story that's carefully calibrated to offend no one."

Without a doubt, Brokeback is a good film, but a tour de force of modern cinema? Well …

Lee made many quality films before Brokeback, which is not even his first foray into gay cinema. He helmed the Taiwanese indie film The Wedding Banquet in 1993, about the love between two men, one Caucasian and one Chinese. 

Assistant professor Chua Ling-Yen, who teaches film in the School of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, suggested that Brokeback might not even be Lee's best work.

"The film is a visual treat to watch, with beautifully shot scenes and brilliant pacing. However, there were also many other well-directed, extremely watchable films released in the same period," she said.

"Also, several of Lee's earlier films are as good. What is unique about Brokeback Mountain, after all the hype has settled, is its subject matter."

they love, they bleed

Years from now, what Brokeback will be remembered for is the way it revolutionalised mainstream cinema.

(Although if you really want to get technical, Annie Proulx's short story, on which the film is based, broke new ground first by subverting the cowboy myth -- one of the most masculine of all myths -- by having two cowboys fall in love.)

In Brokeback, the characters of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist -- played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, respectively -- are portrayed simply as two people in love. It is a film that the gay community has quite naturally embraced.

"By stripping away the mystery and humanising the gay characters, the movie has succeeded in demystifying gay love," said Stuart Koe, the founder of gay web portal Fridae.com, which organised a screening of the film recently. 

"In this regard, Brokeback Mountain breaks more ground than any other gay movie before it by presenting a love story that people seem to be able to universally relate to. It shows that gay men live, love, bleed and die just like anyone else."

Gay men have long been vilified in mainstream cinema, even if independent cinema has championed their cause. Nathan Lane was fabulously feminine in The Birdcage while Jaye Davidson played a man masquerading as a woman in The Crying Game. Hollywood movies also have the tendency to "demonise" homosexual relationships, said Chua.

"Negative stereotypes depict homosexuals as one-dimensional characters who are usually shown as sexually irresponsible, emotionally unstable or even murderous psychotics, for example in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope or the lesbian film The Killing of Sister George," she said.

"So this pioneering representation of a non-negative homosexual relationship that is accepted by mainstream cinema is what Brokeback Mountain will be remembered for."

the gay divide

As Brokeback producer James Schamus told Time, however, the film was never really targeted at a gay audience, although it was assumed men would go along if they did "not want to look like a complete troglodyte to their girlfriends". The original target audience was women.

Mark Shaw, the senior manager of Shaw cinemas, which is distributing the film in Singapore, said: "The target audience of the film may have been women, but we also expect couples to go see it. It's really a film about emotions, as opposed to homosexuality."

Brokeback is that rare film with a niche theme that will appeal to many audiences, yet ironically enough, it is also a film that divides as much as it unites.

As the accolades for Brokeback were pouring in, discrimination reared its ugly head. A cinema in Utah withdrew the film despite it original plans to screen it. Parts of north and central Queensland, Australia will not be showing the film. Then there are those who have gone on record as opposing the film, even going so far as to say gay cowboys do not exist.

In one scene in the film, a heartbroken Jack tells Ennis: "I wish I knew how to quit you." In fact, they both try to "quit" each other, eventually marrying women who are unwittingly drawn into their self-deceptions. It seems that for some segments of society, this is the way they like it. 

Brokeback is brave where society fails to be, and for that alone the accolades are deserved.

At heart: A love story.

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17 February 2006
'Today' newspaper, 'plus' section

At this mountain's core: A love story
Film review by Jeanine Tan

Look past the Brokeback hype and you'll find a heartbreaker 

4 [stars] out of five

A half-page article

If understated is the word to describe the love story between two cowboys in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, then their repressed relationship contrasts starkly with the vast, limitless space in cowboy country that forms the backdrop for the film.

Based on the short story by Annie Proulx, the film explores the doomed love affair between two cowboys who first meet as teenagers in 1960s Wyoming.

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) take jobs tending sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain.

In their isolation, a mutual attraction blooms between these men of very different characters, which sets up the complexities of the relationship that will unfold in their later years.

In Ledger's tongue-tied, emotionally retarded Ennis, whose few words seem to stumble out of his mouth, audiences see a man who is so withdrawn that he can barely come to terms with his own feelings. In contrast, Gyllenhaal's Jack is impulsive and loves at will.

Falling for a man might not be an option for cowboys, but the pair's repressed emotions nonetheless explode into aggressive love-making one cold night.

The only sex scene between the two in the film is not graphic, nor does it have any dialogue. But their grappling initially conceals such self-loathing and desperation that, in saying nothing, the two men manage to say a lot.

It is a device that Lee and Ledger use to great effect throughout the film.

As Brokeback traces the lives of the two men as they grow older, get married -- Ennis to the simple Alma (Michelle Williams) and Jack to the wealthy Lureen (Anne Hathaway) -- have children and begin a clandestine affair, the only moments of liberation they enjoy are in the open spaces of Brokeback Mountain.

It is in those moments of freedom that audiences glimpse the "what might have been" of their lives. That it was Ennis and Jack themselves who chose to deny their true selves makes their story all that much more heartbreaking.

Brokeback Mountain is an important film because it goes where no Hollywood film has gone before.

But don't get carried away with its groundbreaking qualities.

At its core, Brokeback Mountain is a love story about two people who are kept apart by societal norms. 

There have been, and will be, other love stories that possess as much power -- even if they don't wield as much influence as this one.

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