Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love

STEPHEN HOLDEN

THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

Skip to next paragraphOne night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."

That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.

This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.

In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.

Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.

So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.

When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.

Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel.

So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.

Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.

The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.

"Brokeback Mountain" is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.

Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.

Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.

情归断背山

 简介：情归断背山

1963年的灿烂夏日，怀俄明西部，年轻的牛仔杰克•特维斯特(杰克•吉伦哈尔 饰)与恩尼斯•德尔玛(希斯•莱吉尔 饰)因同为牧场主乔•阿桂尔(兰迪•奎德 饰)打工而相识，杰克比较健谈，且骑术高超，恩尼斯自幼父母双亡，性格内向寡语。人迹罕至的断背山深处，高山牧场的放羊工作单调而艰苦，随时有遭遇野兽袭击的可能，供杰克与恩尼斯栖身的帐篷狭小得只能睡下一人，另一人不得不睡在露天篝火旁，起初二人各自放羊，少有交流。直到有一天，二人晚饭时喝多了酒，是夜又分外寒冷，于是杰克与恩尼斯同帐共裘而眠，在酒精与荷尔蒙的作用下，他们之间发生了“不该发生的事”，空虚寂寥让让两个19岁的青年彼此相爱了，一个人做饭，另一个放羊，篝火边长谈，帐篷内欢爱，同性间的纯美真爱伴随二人度过了人生中最美好的一段夏日时光。

　　季节性放牧工作结束后，迫于世俗的压力，杰克与恩尼斯依依不舍地踏上了各自的生活旅程，杰克凭着精湛的骑术成为了德州的竞技牛仔，依靠着妻子露琳(安妮•海瑟薇 饰)家族的扶植而事业蒸蒸日上；留在牧场的恩尼斯迎娶了自幼相识的阿尔玛(米歇尔•威廉姆斯 饰)，每日为嗷嗷待哺的女儿奔忙，过着平凡清苦的日子。弹指间四年过去了，饱受相思之苦的杰克给恩尼斯寄去贺卡，说自己做生意外出时要路过怀俄明，希望能见上一面。重逢后的杰克与恩尼斯深情拥吻，时光的流失并未冲淡二人心中炽热的情感，在随后的十几年中，杰克与恩尼斯都定期约会钓鱼。表面上的婚姻让阿尔玛的内心苦楚不堪，她知道丈夫每年消失在断臂山中与老友杰克钓鱼的真正原因，而杰克与恩尼斯也经受着同性恋所招致的巨大偏见和世俗压力。最终，厮守一生的愿望因杰克的意外身亡而落空。在杰克去世后，恩尼斯来到了杰克父母的农场，想把杰克的骨灰带回到二人初识的断臂山。在杰克的房间里，他发现了一个秘密：初识时他们各自穿过的衬衫被整齐地套在了同一个衣挂上。这个秘密让恩尼斯潸然泪下，他意识到杰克是多么爱他，自己又多么深爱杰克。但无论爱是怎样的浓烈，最终见证它的只有那座壮美苍郁的断背山。

幕后故事：恋爱中的牛仔

1997年10月13日，当普利策奖得主安妮•普罗克斯的短篇小说《断背山》首次刊载于《纽约客》杂志时，故事中浑然而出的雄性气概、寂寥苍茫的远山景致打破了同性恋的神秘，犹如投入平静湖面的一块碎石，在广大读者的心中激起片片涟漪。著名作家拉里•麦克默特里、黛安娜•奥萨纳将《断》改编为电影剧本，并保留了原著细腻优雅的文学色彩，但剧本在李安接手之前，在好莱坞圈中曾数次易手，鉴于题材的敏感与可操作性，多数导演采取了观望的态度，就连一向特立独行的加斯•范•桑特，对于剧本的反应也是无奈摇头，甚至在李安接手之后，制片人还是费了很大的力气才找来了预算资金。

　　当被问及为何拣了《断》这颗烫手山芋时，李安的回答简单得有些举重若轻：“我第一次读这个故事时就被打动了，它以一种不同寻常的方式讲述了一段美国式爱情，故事结尾处，当读到沾有因年轻时打架而留下血迹的二人的旧衬衫套挂在同一个衣挂时，我流泪了。” 12年前的《喜宴》、而今的《断臂山》，对于李安而言，就像是一次轮回，但情境况味却决然不同，《断》片主人公身在美国西部，而当地颂扬的是男子气概及传统价值，他们的情感无法走上台面，而上世纪60年代的美国社会物欲横流，因此，西部牛仔之间这种原始的、发自内心的情感更显珍贵，正可谓，伟大的爱情故事面前必有巨大的世俗障碍。

拍摄花絮：真爱无关性别

影片从筹备到杀青，用去了近两年时间，期间，李安经历了丧父的打击，坚持拍完《断》片既是他完成对于父亲的承诺，也是内心的一次理疗过程，“其实，每个人心底都有一座‘断臂山’，有人正想回去，但有人永远也回不去了。”对于该如何塑造和看待这段同性之爱，李安的观点更为坦白，“爱是可以超越文化差异的，当爱降临时，异性之爱与同性之爱是毫无差别的，爱老婆与爱男人是一样的，在观看本片时，不妨把性别撇在一旁。”

　　男主演杰克•吉伦哈尔自称为忠诚的“李安迷”，虽然在演绎同志激情戏时事先心存顾虑，但在李安“真爱无关性别”的观点指引下很快就丢掉了包袱，现实生活中，吉伦哈尔的成长背景与角色相距甚远，为此他特别在“牛仔训练营”中训练了1个月，最终博得了导演“马骑得很性感”的赞许评价；另一男主演希斯•莱吉尔来自澳洲西部，气质上与美国西部人颇为相似，虽说在理解和塑造角色上并无障碍，但为了“形、神、音”兼备，特别拜师学习了德州牛仔腔调，拍摄现场的莱吉尔相当的投入，拍吻戏时几乎弄破了吉伦哈尔的鼻子。同性之爱是悲怆刻骨的，但在片场之外却真的诞生了一段浪漫恋情，片中貌合神离的莱吉尔与米歇尔•威廉姆斯在合作中擦出了爱情火花，就在10月28日，已经订婚的莱吉尔和威廉姆斯的爱情结晶——女儿玛蒂尔达出生了。

点评：志在奥斯卡

以制片人詹姆斯•谢玛斯的观点来看，影片的核心观众是女性，因此海报没有采用典型西部风格的设计方案，而是借鉴了《泰坦尼克号》的构图灵感，同样散发着浪漫唯美气息。影片开始后用近一个小时来展现山区的美景，悲欢交错与世事变迁中绵延22年之久的牛仔同志情意，与苍郁高远的外景地洛基山脉相互辉映，将观众一步步拖入情境之中，压抑与束缚是李安作品中最常流露出的情绪，尤其是莱吉尔把一个牛仔对于同性之爱的渴望、彷徨与不安刻画得入木三分。

　　全片绝无为同志助威呐喊之意，旨在呼唤爱的理解，因此部分西方媒体直接以“西部同志史诗”称呼本片。虽然一些传统卫道士仍会瞧着《断》片眼眶发青，但在试映会上，观众的反映颇为积极，甚至气氛颇为哀伤，许多人被感动得泪眼婆娑。“就美国文化而言，李安对于每一方面都显示出了极大的热情，”制片人詹姆斯•谢玛斯如是说：“包括我们不愿去面对的方面。”

因此有评论指出，之前从没有一部美国电影如此纯洁、神圣地刻画过两个男人间的爱欲纠葛，影片从某种意义上试图改变国家的话语系统，挑战着人们之于同性恋关系的价值观，同时也重置了好莱坞数十年来西部片的传统概念。威尼斯电影节折桂之后，本片如今又成了奥斯卡奖的最有力竞争者之一。5年前，《卧虎藏龙》让李安与最佳导演失之交臂，如今，圆梦的时候又到了。

引用地址： http://www.xici.net/b2467/d34419973.htm