Venice Dispatch. 3.

Whilst any international film festival's more avant-garde showcases usually provide a hotspot for after-film coffee and cigarettes fuelled discussion, it is Venice's more mainstream films which have so far proved to be the most interesting: George Clooney's sophisticated slick black-and-white Good Night, and Good Luck, about a worn broadcast journalist's attempts to put a stop to the madness of Joseph McCarthy, is already a festival favorite, and a good contender for a prize of some sort – and there is Ang Lee's epic Brokeback Mountain, dubbed by those whose couldn't see the merits that lay beyond its clichéd direction, "The Gay Cowboy Film."

Though there was nothing particularly shocking in the film's homosexual love story, as I watched Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal - playing two sheep herders in the early 60s - engage in some rough anal sex, I wondered how their young female fans would react to this once the film achieved wide release - but in our hermetically-sealed bubble of the Lido, filmmakers have to do a lot more than that to raise eyebrows and wake sleeping critics.

We are only three days into the Venice Film Festival, and there are many more promising films which have yet to have their first screenings. But as I trundle, sweating, through the muggy heat of the Lido, into and out of the tight security checkpoints that are required to enter any screening, I wonder if I will see another scene as rawly beautiful and sad as Ledger's final trembling moment from Brokeback, on the verge of imploding under the accumulated weight of frustrated love, hating his inability to accept his homosexuality and the tragic effects and emotional ruin all this has had on the more vulnerable Gyllenhaal.

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2005 3:59 AM