Perhaps THE Movie of the Coming Years

Rating: 10/10 (9 December 2005)

This is a movie about male friendship and love, and, incidentally, male sexuality. Every guy will remember such pairs, most of whom were not as lucky as to have been able to continue their love on into the years of marriage and fatherhood. The story and film present a central theme of contemporary gender studies: the meaning of masculinity and the experience of being a man in postmodern Western culture. We must remember that there are urban cowboys, suburban cowboys, European cowboys. This is hugely moving film. It's epigraph might have been Enid Starkie's comment: "Only two members of the same sex have power to wound one another so deeply when things go wrong between them, and to wound one another where hurt is most intolerable." This film begins a new look at relationships between men. It is not a film about homosexuality. It is about love between men.