Bad Love

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2005)

Brokeback Mountain is almost like "Boys Don't Cry" with the genders reversed. Both movies demonstrate, beautifully, the irony of a land in which the most sociologically restricting of areas are often the ones with the most wide open of spaces. Here is the love story of two men who cannot be in love with each other, and not just because society doesn't allow it; they can barely say aloud what they are. The second half of the film slows down the momentum and gets a tad episodic, but the overall effect is extraordinary. Ang Lee has been cinema's foremost chronicler of repressed emotions for the past decade, but never before has he allowed those emotions to explode and resonate with the clarity and force that they do here.