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Ang Lee's award-winning gay western is the most important film to come out of America in years, says What's on near B Ruby Rich me? Friday September 23, 2005 Enter your postcode The Guardian Go

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Utterly new... Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain

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Love in the time of Wyoming, 1963. Two young drifters turn up at a remote treachery office and get hired to spend the summer together,

Rick Moody on the original herding sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain. Suspicious, Godzilla laconic, stunned by cold and hardship, they don't seem a natural pair - until, drunk one night, enforced intimacy John Patterson: On film turns to sexual contact. It's a contact that is just as Jeanette Winterson on unexpected and unacceptable to them as it remains to Tacita Dean's films some today, especially in the rural American west. In a Nicholas Blincoe on stunning reversal, though, the drifters fall emotionally and whether Oliver Twist was physically in love. Up on idyllic Brokeback Mountain, far based on story of real-life from social approbation, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and orphan, Robert Blincoe Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) luxuriate in a rough-and- tumble idyll as Edenic in spirit as it is in setting. The mountain seems to bless their union, but inexorably the air begins to chill, they come down off the mountain, and they part. Five years later, they meet again - now married they part. Five years later, they meet again - now married with children - and Ang Lee's extraordinary saga, Brokeback Mountain, advances through the decades with them.

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Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it. Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando - all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon - from Mala Noche and Poison to High Art and Boys Don't Cry - it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.

A fortnight ago, Ang Lee flew to Venice to accept the Golden Lion grand prize at the Venice film festival. Last week, Ledger and Gyllenhaal flew to Canada to accept the wild ovations of the crowds at the Toronto International film festival. Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off.

The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, set in New York or Chicago, Portland or London. Firmly grounded in the realities of gay life, they sought a new vocabulary for a post-Aids experience. Its film-makers prioritised a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. These were usually sidebar films, not galas; they were These were usually sidebar films, not galas; they were most often Directors' Fortnight or Sundance films, not Cannes or Venice main competitions - not at least until Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry. They were festival films through and through, not multiplex movies.

Now, Brokeback Mountain has blown this division wide open, collapsing the borders and creating something entirely new in the process. With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.

Peering down through the years at the power of that Brokeback Mountain summer on the lives of Ennis and Jack, Lee delivers a virtually forensic vision of desire, denial and emotional cost. The depth of Ennis and Jack's attachment to one another gives their lives meaning and drains all other meaning out of them, rendering the men both enriched and destitute emotionally. If Brokeback Mountain never shies away from the sexual truth of that attachment, it doesn't settle for the merely explicit either. It's a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that's broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society's intolerance and threats, an individual's fear and repression.

In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema. Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has brought the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before Stonewall, a gay-liberation movement, or the identity politics of modern queer identities.

As Brokeback Mountain moves the men's story forward through the decades, as they escape from their wives and pursue each other through fishing trips (nope, those will never be innocent again) in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. If that seems an artificial excision concocted to heighten drama, consider that Proulx's story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. Shepard was tortured and killed in October 1998, just outside Laramie, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday. Oh yes, among his other interests, Shepard loved to fish and hunt. His cruel fate for the simple sin of to fish and hunt. His cruel fate for the simple sin of homosexuality was a horrific reminder of exactly how provisional and geographically specific contemporary tolerance remains.

Now, however, the first wave of critics to see the film have already begun to build on the obvious, informing readers that westerns were already gay; there has already been a rush of wanton nomination as genre favourites are reconsidered. It's irresistible, I suppose, but it's all wrong. Ever since the dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the homosocial world of the classic western. But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromisingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire and fulfilment, a playground of sexuality freed from judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame.

But Brokeback Mountain has a lineage to which it can lay claim. Consider, for instance, Giant, the 1955 film starring James Dean in his final role as the black sheep of a Texas cattle-ranching family. Given the tales of Dean's bisexuality and his claims to have worked as street hustler, his cowboy duds in that final posthumous role were frosting on the cake. Cowboys had long been a gay fantasy, anyway, as their manly ways and absence of womenfolk allowed fantasies of desire to run free.

Andy Warhol certainly had noticed the appeal of hunky cowboys for the gay imagination - and the dangers they courted. He had his early feature film, Lonesome Cowboys, shot in 1968 in Oracle, Arizona, utilising a movie-ready Main Street constructed nearly 30 years earlier for use in westerns. But Warhol became a target of an FBI investigation after locals and tourists complained of immoral goings-on on set.

Lonesome Cowboys won the best-film award at the San Francisco film festival at the end of the year. It was 1968, after all, and the counter-culture was taking over the mainstream. Morality was up for grabs, and Warhol's hip version of aberrance was wildly appealing - and widely denounced by outraged citizens with the FBI at their disposal. Consider that, in Lee's film, 1968 is the year in which Jack and Ennis reunite, the year in which Ennis begins his long refusal even to consider Jake's pleas to live out their days together.

In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol's lead in ascribing queerness to cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male friendships. Through Voight's education regarding what fantasies he's come to New York City to serve, he also glimpses the true love that can simmer in a buddy in jeans.

Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come. But Lee also knows something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no bounds of gender, nationality, or era.

It is fascinating indeed that after his green mis-step in The Hulk, Lee has returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet, released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it's noteworthy that Lee's longtime producer and scenarist James Schamus (co-president of Focus Features, the company that produced and will release Brokeback Mountain), also executive-produced many of the New Queer Cinema films, often alongside the legendary Christine Vachon. He's credited on Poison, Swoon, and Safe.

Times have changed, and unlike the sunny upbeat Wedding Banquet, this new film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved by a turnabout of forgiving parents. Brokeback Mountain, by raising the stakes, merits far greater praise. Ang Lee has done nothing less than re-imagined America as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture.

· Brokeback Mountain is released on December 30.

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