Events

Come see Brokeback Mountain presented on 35mm film on the big screen in L3!

A gripping tale of forbidden love and prejudice, Brokeback Mountain stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as two star-crossed lovers whose affection can never be made public because of the raging homophobia prominent in West America between the 1960s and 1980s, where the story is set.

During a summer in Wyoming spent working together as herdsmen, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) engage in a passionate sexual and romantic relationship hidden from the outside world. While they both agree on it being a one-time thing and take separate ways, settling down with women in different parts of the country, their love haunts them for the rest of their lives along with Ennis’ memory of the beaten-to-death bodies of a couple of homosexual men his father showed him as a child. The conflict between their feelings for each other and the expectation and discrimination of the society they lived in, reflected in Ennis’ recollection, forces them to conceal their illicit romance and contemporarily watch their respective marriages disintegrate.

Ang Lee skillfully directs a singular story of an impossible love, which, in its individuality, recounts the universal tale of the suppression of one’s own desires when faced with the prejudices and preconceptions held by a community. Brokeback Mountain may be set in the last decades of 20th century, but portrays the perennial tragedy of the oppression of the individual to satisfy the norms of a society.

Marta Meazza