Brokeback Mountain is 15 y.o.
Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" premiered on September 2, 2005 at the Venice Film Festival. The genre of this film is defined by some critics as "gay western", and it is claimed that Ang Lee's film was the first film of this genre. However, many critics refute this statement, believing that films of this genre were produced by US filmmakers back in the 40s of the last century. But we are not talking about this genre now, but about this particular film.
The jury of the Venice Film Festival, chaired by the famous Italian production designer, art director and costume designer Dante Feretti, awarded the film "Brokeback Mountain" the main prize - the Golden Lion. Although, in fairness, Ang Lee's picture had no serious competitors. Roughly the same cast of nominees nominated for the European Screen International Award, but the European film academics found George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" more worthy of their award.
At the beginning of the next year, 2006, "Brokeback Mountain" received 7 nominations for the American Golden Globe Award, of which it won 4, including the most important: Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Director - Motion Picture. The strongest competitors to "Brokeback Mountain" and its director at this film forum were probably "Match Point" and its director Woody Allen.
Following this, "Brokeback Mountain" received 8 Academy Award nominations, of which 3 won. In the most important nomination for Best Motion Picture of the Year, "Brokeback Mountain" lost to Paul Haggis's "Crash", but in the other major nomination - Best Achievement in Directing - Ang Lee won, and he became the first director of Asian origin to receive this award. Fans of the film were almost certain that the Oscar would go to "Brokeback Mountain" like a Golden Globe, and attributed the failure to homophobia of some members of the American Film Academy. In principle, they were not that far from the truth. (It took only 10-15 years, and the picture, judging by the decisions of the American Film Academy in recent years, has radically changed.)
The British Film Academy, in contrast to the American, recognized the unconditional superiority of Ang Lee's film and awarded it with BAFTA awards both in the Best Film nomination and with David Lean Award for Direction. But the Danish Film Academy did not award Ang Lee's film and awarded its Bodil Prize to David Cronenberg's film "A History of Violence". The same did the Italian film academics, who awarded their David di Donatello in the nomination for Best Foreign Film to Paul Haggis's film "Crash".
Finally, in 2007, the "Brokeback Mountain" competed for the French César Award for Best Foreign Film (Meilleur film étranger), but was also defeated by another American film, "Little Miss Sunshine".
The attitude of film critics to this film can be described as "reserved enthusiasm." Roger Ebert, for example, gave "Brokeback Mountain" 4 stars, that is, the maximum, but did not include it in his list of "Great Movies". Another famous American film critic James Berardinelli gave the film 3 stars out of 4 possible, while in his review he noted that "Brokeback Mountain isn't for everyone, but for those who are not bothered by the homosexual relationship, it offers a study in yearning, love, and loss."
However, I was most interested in how the mouthpiece of the US Democratic Party, The New York Times, evaluates this film. And, as I expected, this edition has the most rave reviews for "Brokeback Mountain". Stephen Holden noted in his review that "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" since Mark Twain also described "an unconscious romantic attachment between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave...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."
The famous Russian film critic Valery Kichin in his review made an interesting comparison of Ang Lee's film with the literary basis of the film - the story of the same name by Annie Proulx, published in the New Yorker magazine in 1997: “The readers cried over the final description of the bloody jacket of a murdered friend, in which the friend alive straightened his shirt - a participant in their former happiness.This posthumous embrace of empty clothes is a detail for literature, perhaps strong, but literally transferred to the screen, it becomes an outright tear-squeezer.There are many such sentimental overkill in the film, which became one of the reasons his rejection by part of the public. "
Whether or not the public accepted this film can be judged by the following data. With a total budget of $ 19 million (14 million - production, 5 million - marketing), the total box office gross was $ 178 million. 63% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film an 8-10 rating.
With that said, Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" was rated 9.25 by FilmGourmand, placing it 107th in the Golden Thousand.
