Come to where the flavor is

Noel Vera

It's the most Oscar-nominated film this year, won major awards in
the Golden Globes, been praised by most critics (the mainstream
ones), earned over fifty million dollars in the US alone (costing
only $14 million to make); you can arguably say it's the single most
successful gay film ever made. Ladies and gents, I give
you "Hollywood discovers homosexuals"--better known as "Brokeback
Mountain."

A good look at the picture will give you an idea of what it takes
for a film--gay, independent, ethnic of any kind--to break into the
American market and win the awards horse race. The film's got to be
safe--or if it has a controversial subject matter, got to present
its subject in as unthreatening a manner as possible (you can pat
yourself in the back for being courageous without really rocking the
boat). The film's got to be free of any in-your-face sex, especially
between men (women-on-women are a different matter--can't have
enough of those). The film must not hint at any anger, just a sense
of the general futility of it all, and if a gay man dies, the death
should be mourned in an elegiac manner--no defiance, no hate
directed at anything except maybe at The Way Things Are. Good taste,
above all, must prevail.

Ang Lee, who was final choice among a list that included gay
independent filmmaker Gus Van Sant, is perfectly suited to direct
such a film; he is, after all, the patron saint of good taste. He's
tackled everything from a variation of "La cage aux folles" ("The
Wedding Banquet") to Jane Austen ("Sense and Sensibility"--a perfect
match, except I happen to think Austen a genuinely great writer) to
comic book superheroes ("Hulk"--easily his quirkiest if most
emotionally obtuse work). He's taken established genres like the
wuxia pian (films about martial chivalry) with its own share of
great works and classics, sucked out pretty much everything that
made the genre both fascinating and maddening (the extreme violence,
the frenetic pacing, the vulgar mix of emotional tones--outrageous
melodrama followed by intense action topped with the crudest
slapstick), used the latest digital technology instead of
traditional wire effects (an art form in itself), and shot the film
in a self-effacingly glossy (read: undistinguished) camera style,
full of tasteful (read: lifeless) colors. The result was "Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the single most commercially successful wuxia
pian film ever made, and one many hardcore fans can't watch without
gagging.

Lee's the Great Moderator, the Man With the Gold-plated Touch; deep
down he really wants to be contemporary Taiwanese filmmaker Hou
Hsiao Hsien, whose understated genius he desperately wants to
emulate--and does, up to a point. But where Hou allows silence to
draw you in, to deepen the mystery central to much of his work, Lee
doesn't have the courage to go quite as far; his commercial
instincts are too strong to allow him to become the true artist that
Hou is, and it galls him, boxoffice success, Golden Globe trophies
and Oscar nominations notwithstanding.

And so Lee comes to the gay film--to this gay film--and wields his
transformational muzak--sorry--magic. Based on an Annie Proulx short
story published in the New Yorker (the high court of all things
tasteful, laced with just enough 'edge' to make it seem
interesting), it's about two cowboys, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger)
and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) who herd sheep on the slopes of
Brokeback, and who in a small tent in freezing weather, have sex.
They spend the next few decades married with children but meet again
a few times each year, having realized that, despite declarations to
the contrary, there was more to this than a quick roll on the
sleeping bags.

Proulx's is a slight enough story, tastefully written (as befits the
venue), with just enough pain and tragedy eyedropped into the mix to
make matters vaguely romantic. Novelist Larry McMurtry ("The Last
Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove"), who's made the American South his
territory, has stretched the story to feature-film length, mostly by
adding dialogue and fleshing out the various female characters.
McMurtry is usually good at complex, unsentimental sketches of
women, and you can't help but suspect (what with McMurtry's
involvement and the way the film is cast, directed, marketed)
that "Brokeback" is aimed at the same market that reads "slash"
fiction--women, in effect; the campaign to call it a "universal"
love story is meant to cast a wider net, pulling in gay men,
straight women, straight men dating women, maybe even political
conservatives (a gay man dies in it, after all, and the survivor
lives a lonely, presumably chaste, life). There've been protests
over the film from the extreme right, especially in the American
Bible Belt, but much of the resistance has vanished
since "Brokeback" won big at the Golden Globes (paving the way to a
wider release, with more theaters and bigger boxoffice), and has yet
to reach the ferocity leveled against Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11" or Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ." Seen
this way, "universal" starts to sound suspiciously like "mostly
harmless."

Lee brings to the project his trademark brand of blandness--this
looks like something any number of workmanlike directors could have
done, even Joel Schumacher if someone fed him enough tranquilizers
and sat on his head throughout the shoot (and in fact he was
considered at one point). Much of the mountain footage looks as if
it had been cribbed from cigarette commercials; the initial sex
between Ennis and Jack only looks like sex because they have their
pants off and are facing the same direction (you hear grunting, but
it could easily be constipation on Jack's part). Maybe the most
unintentionally funny moment is when Ennis' wife Alma (Michelle
Williams) confronts him in her kitchen with his
homosexuality: "Don't lie, don't try to fool me, Ennis. I know what
it means. Jack Twist? Jack Nasty," to which Ennis can only shout
back "Shut up, mind your own business."

If I find that funny, it may be because it's such a familiar scene
from films with closeted gay men it's almost a law: Lino Brocka did
a painful variation (an appalled Jay Ilagan confronting his father,
played by Eddie Garcia) in "Tubog sa Guinto" (Dipped in Gold, 1971),
and there it has particular force because Brocka is a master at
wringing every last drop of energy out of melodrama, embracing
instead of being embarrassed at the sheer shamelessness of it all,
at the same time giving the melodrama the ring--the taint, if you
will--of human truth. Ledger and Williams scream and yell, and Lee
temporarily lets loose with the handheld camera, but it's a brief
break, presumably to allow some circulation to return to the
audience's limbs; the camera quickly settles back down and records
the rest of the picture with arthritic grace.

"Brokeback's" not a bad film per se, and if it does further the
cause of gay cinema in the United States, then hooray and more power
to it, at least in that respect. But as gay film critic David
Ehrenstein points out in the L.A. Weekly, "We're…encouraged to
ignore the precedents shattered by three decades of truly
groundbreaking queer films--with 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' (1971)
leading a pack that also includes 'My Beautiful Laundrette'
(1985), 'Parting Glances' (1986), Todd Haynes' 'Poison' (1991)
and 'Velvet Goldmine' (1998), Gus Van Sant's 'Mala Noche' (1985)
and 'My Own Private Idaho' (1991), 'Savage Nights' (1992), 'The Long
Day Closes' (1992), 'Wild Reeds' (1994), 'Urbania' (2000), 'Les
Passagers' (1999), Patrice Chereau's 'L'Homme Blesse' (1983)
and 'Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train' (1998), 'Kinsey' (2004),
and, just this year, 'Tropical Malady' and 'Mysterious Skin.'"

Add to that long list Brocka's "Tubog sa Guinto" and "Ang Tatay Kong
Nanay" (My Father My Mother, 1978), Mario O'Hara's "Babae sa
Bubungang Lata" (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), and Auraeus Solito's
lovely "Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros" (The Blossoming of
Maximo Oliveros, 2005), and you just have to ask yourself: if
Hollywood has just discovered the gay film (Lee's own "The Wedding
Banquet" with its gay Asian protagonist, and Jonathan
Demme's "Philadelphia"--as much a 'disease of the month' flick as it
is a gay one--don't really count), in what dark, deep orifice has it
been hiding its head all this time, and why? The possible answers to
the question are mind-boggling.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/17/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)