Brokeback Mountain

Herald rating: * * * *

Eight Oscar nominations welcome this adaptation of Annie Proulx's poignant love story into the mainstream.

That may be cause for cheer, since the two lovers are men, but the film is conspicuously uninterested in sexual politics.

Love - and more importantly the havoc wrought by its barely fulfilled nature - and not sexuality is the focus here.

So to call it a "gay cowboy love story" rather misses the point, not least since it opens in the summer of 1963 when the word "gay" was an obscure codeword in the urban demi-monde.

"I ain't queer," says one, after the sudden, rough coupling that signals the beginning of their relationship.

"Me neither," says the other.

In other circumstances, those might seem like empty utterances but they go to the heart of the story and they make it quite apt that a passionate kissing sequence - which serves an entirely different dramatic need - and a rough house fight are the only other scenes of physical intimacy.

This is not a film about two men who have sex but about two human beings who love each other.

Set mostly under the gaze of the jagged peak of the title in Wyoming (though filmed in Alberta), the film considerably expands Proulx's 40-page story about ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Ledger, left) and rodeo rider Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal, right) who take on a job guarding sheep from coyotes in the upland summer pastures.

Their meeting, outside the employer's office, fills a long and brilliant wordless opening scene, a small masterpiece in itself in which character is carefully revealed by costume, props and the occasional glance.

The arc of the story is best not described here though it's worth noting that their first night takes place pretty early on.

The movie spans the decades that follow (the passage of time is deftly marked by changes in equipment or technology) as the men try to blend what has happened with their conventional married lives.

And they are lives blighted, rather than enriched, by love. At times, the emotions are so repressed that the men's pain seems fearfully remote, but maybe that's apt too.

We sense Ledger's choked passions in every half-swallowed syllable he utters and he plays Del Mar like a poker player flipping one card at a time; it's only when everything's on the table - in a harrowing lakeside scene in which Del Mar pours out the pain be has bottled up - that we realise how much he's been holding.

Gyllenhaal, the less tragic character, plays generously, giving Ledger room, while creating a character of texture and depth.

It seems almost superfluous to add that the landscape, lensed by Rodrigo Prieto who impressed on Amores Perros and 25th Hour, is almost another character.

Jaw-droppingly handsome, and full of 3D clouds, it is a place of wild desolation not unlike the two hearts beating beneath it.

CAST: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid
DIRECTOR: Ang Lee
RUNNING TIME: 134 Minutes
RATING: M, violence, offensive language and sex
SCREENING: Village, Rialto, Hoyts, cinemas from Thursday