In American cinema, mountains are a promise. They are John Ford's frontier, unspoiled space to be shaped by will and gunpowder, the ultimate boundary between civilization and the wild, magnificent indifference of nature. They are the theater of Myth. Then Ang Lee arrives and, with the quiet devastation of an underwater earthquake, tells us that no, mountains are not a promise. They are a secret. And the most impassable frontier is not the geographical one, but the one sealed behind a man's clenched teeth. Brokeback Mountain is not a western, but its ghost; it is the funeral elegy for a genre that has always celebrated an idea of masculinity as monolithic as it is, ultimately, fragile.

We are in Wyoming, 1963. The landscape, captured by Rodrigo Prieto's lens with a palette that seems stolen from a Hudson River School painting, is immense, sublime in the Kantian sense of the term: so magnificent as to be terrifying. In this primordial void, two fragments of humanity adrift meet: Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, whose performance is a sculpture of repressed trauma) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal, who vibrates with an incurable, tragic hope). They are hired to herd sheep on the fictional Brokeback Mountain, a temporary Eden isolated from the world. Lee immerses us in the slow, repetitive rhythm of their work: pitching the tent, the fire, watching over the sheep, the silence. A silence that is almost a character, dense with everything that cannot be said in the world below. When passion explodes between them, on a freezing night warmed by whiskey, it is not portrayed as a choice or a joyful revelation, but as a force of nature, as inevitable and violent as a snowstorm. It is an act that happens to them, not by them, a telluric eruption in two seismically unstable souls.

Herein lies the film's first, brilliant short circuit. Ang Lee takes the iconography of the frontier man, the stoic and self-sufficient archetype forged by decades of cinema, and reveals its core of desperate loneliness. Ennis, in particular, is an almost atavistic figure. He speaks in monosyllables, with a voice that seems to come from a deep well, and his body is a perpetually tense armor, as if he were expecting a blow at any moment. Ledger does not play Ennis, he inhabits him with a physical mimesis that is miraculous. He is Hemingway's man catapulted into a Greek tragedy, unable to articulate his pain except through bursts of violence. Jack, on the other hand, is the dreamer, the only one who dares to name the “thing” that binds them, who imagines an impossible future, a small ranch where they can live together. He is the driving and tragic force of the story, the Sisyphus who continues to push the boulder of their love against the mountain of impossibility.

Their story, which unfolds over twenty years of clandestine encounters, of “fishing trips” that are escapes from lives built on lies, takes on the contours of a private myth. Brokeback Mountain becomes a place of the soul, a Proustian non-locality where time stands still and they can be themselves, before returning to the valley, to their wives, children, and the pretense of normality that consumes them. The film, based on a short story by Annie Proulx that is as sharp as a razor, has the extraordinary ability to expand that stripped-down prose into a lyrical epic, without ever betraying its brutalist spirit. The screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who spent years finding a director and funding, is a masterpiece of narrative economy. Every line of dialogue, every glance, every silence is laden with enormous weight, with years of unspoken words. Ennis's famous line, “If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it,” is his epitaph, the mantra of an entire existence lived in apnea.

It is impossible not to think of Terrence Malick when looking at Lee's use of the landscape. As in Days of Heaven, nature is a silent and impassive witness to small, desperate human events. But while in Malick's work nature is a sort of pantheistic, almost divine entity, in Brokeback Mountain it is a reflection of the inner state of the protagonists: vast, lonely, beautiful, and cruel. It is the only space large enough to contain a love that society considers monstrous. When Ennis and Jack are on the mountain, the camera takes its time, framing them in very long shots, tiny figures in a boundless landscape. When they return to the city, the shots become tighter, claustrophobic, the interiors suffocating, the colors desaturated. It is a visual language that communicates imprisonment better than a thousand words.

The film, released in 2005, was a cultural event. Hasty labeled “the gay cowboy movie,” it became a symbolic battleground, a Rorschach test for an America that was painstakingly renegotiating its identity boundaries. Its infamous defeat at the Oscars against Crash remains one of the most discussed and symptomatic pages in the history of the Academy, proof that perhaps, in 2006, a work of such emotional scope and such radical questioning of the American myth was still a step too far. But historical judgment, however interesting, risks obscuring the true greatness of the film, which is not political, but universal. Brokeback Mountain is not so much about homosexuality as it is about the devastating nature of secrecy and the tragedy of unexpressed love. It is a story that could be set in Shakespeare's Verona or Pasternak's Russia. Its strength lies precisely in having chosen the most unlikely context, the heart of the American male myth, to tell a story of vulnerability and denied desire.

Gustavo Santaolalla's soundtrack, with its sparse and melancholic acoustic guitar theme, is the heartbeat of the film. A few chords repeated like a memory that won't go away punctuate the narrative without ever being intrusive, becoming the very melody of nostalgia and loss. It is the sound of an empty space.

In the end, what remains is a scene of almost unbearable iconic power. Ennis, in Jack's camper after his death, discovers their two shirts, one inside the other, hanging on a hanger, hidden behind his own. It is an image that transcends the narrative and becomes an almost religious symbol, a relic of a love that existed only in those shreds of fabric, in that hiding place within a hiding place. When Ennis takes them home and hangs them in his closet, placing his shirt over Jack's for protection, and whispers “Jack, I swear...”, he is not performing an act of remembrance, but one of integration. He is finally making room in his stifling world for that part of himself he has fought against all his life. It is not a consolation, nor is it a happy ending. It is just a realization, the most heartbreaking of all: that the only possible home for their love is the darkness of a closet. And in that darkness, Brokeback Mountain ceases to be a film and becomes part of our emotional geography, a silent and unforgettable peak in the landscape of contemporary cinema.