Mike: So, are we seeing Brokeback Mountain tomorrow night?
JP: Yes, definitely. Er, you do know it’s quite sad, don’t you?
Mike: Is it? Well, that’s fine. I have plenty of moral resilience.
JP: Huh?
Mike: Oh, did I say moral? I meant emotional. Emotional resilience.
JP: Now I understand.
Mike: I got my emotions and my morals confused. Not for the first time, either.
JP: Always dangerous when that happens.
Mike: Tell me about it…
Update: How strange. I left the cinema last night dry of eye, distinctly underwhelmed, and cursing my over-heightened expectations; and yet today, I can’t shake the damned film out of my head. Meanwhile, two people I know have already been to see it twice, one of them claiming that it’s the best film he has ever seen.
I shall file this one under Slow Burner. Perhaps because it has taken a little while for my perspective to pull back from the particular (a gay “issue” flick) to the universal (a meditation upon missed opportunities) – but also because of the lingering quality of the individual performances: the looks, the pauses, the things left unsaid.
I’d do a longer review, but Tom Coates and Lubin Odana have already done such excellent jobs that there scarcely seems to be any point. Go read them instead. They nail it.
troubled diva 