Directed by Ang Lee, “The Secret of Brokeback Mountain” was a phenomenal success upon its release. Since then, the film has been remembered as one of cinema’s greatest love stories. It’s finally available on Netflix.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon… the list of actors who turned down Brokeback Mountain is long. Today, this unloved project, which took more than eight years to develop, remains one of the defining films of the early 21st century.
Adapted from a short story written by Annie Proulx and published in the New Yorker in 1997, the drama tells the passion of two Wyoming cowboys in the early sixties. Trapped in a system that leaves no room for difference, the two men, married and fathers, maintain a secret love for more than twenty years in the plains of the American West.
At a time when homosexuality is still a cautious subject in Hollywood, actors and directors are turning their backs on the project. “We needed a solid cast because nobody wanted them”, recalls filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who finally gave way to Taiwanese Ang Lee. After a wave of refusal, two young talents accept: Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
They don’t know it yet, but the duo are about to bring to the screen what will be one of the greatest films of their respective careers. When it was released in 2005, The Secret of Brokeback Mountain opens a new page in the history of American cinema.
Awarded in Venice and nominated eight times for the Oscars – Ledger and Gyllenhaal won their first nomination – it brought in more than 170 million dollars worldwide for a budget of 14 million. An unimaginable success for this project once boycotted by the studios.
Focus Features
Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain”.
Sixteen years before Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, The Secret of Brokeback Mountain already thwarted the cliché codes of the virile and heartless cowboy to reveal a whole new face. Formally, the film is an assumed melodrama, but deep down, it tackles systemic homophobia and questions the evil that eats away at the cult of masculinity.
“That Brokeback Mountain is the subject of a joke and quickly reduced to “movie with gay cowboys” says a lot about the unease that surrounds his subject”wrote the journalist Manohla Dargis in the New York Times in 2005. That year, several US states and foreign countries censored the film upon its release.
In the United States as in France, the drama of Ang Lee gives birth to a large community of fans. Seventeen years later, discussion forums around Brokeback Mountain and its characters are still active on the Web. Its arrival on Netflix is an opportunity for a whole new generation of viewers to discover this masterpiece about unconditional love.
The Secret of Brokeback Mountain is available on Netflix.