Desire of object obscure

Rating: 7/10 (14 November 2008)

With different actors, this might have been a beautiful little film. With those present, it's likable and suggestive, but too remote from its subject. Perhaps it could have used a different director as well, because the subject appears to be outside this one's natural range.
The subject (surprisingly, given the publicity that surrounded the film) is not homosexuality, in its own right, but the power of desire. The particular case shown happens to be the desire of one man for another, but it could as easily be for anyone else not allowable. The characters possessed by it seem as straight as they are queer, so that what their encounter with each other opens up may or may not be their innermost nature. In either case, and more importantly, it's the fulfillment of the strongest desire they've ever experienced or can imagine. The rest of the film traces which ways they go, and how far, under its sway.
Plenty of films have shown characters throwing all away for the sake of passion. But generally their stories are presented as tragedies or comedies. This is the only one to show the series of little, everyday, foolish or wayward acts to which a man can be drawn by the irresistibly compelling, almost besotting force of a temptation. The excitement it introduces into his mind, crowding everything else into a corner; his fear and longing for it, which throw him into a kind of fog through which everything else looks vague and far away; his shunting aside of family, friends, job, all the obligations that seemed important before now dropped while he runs after his desire; the fabricating of stories to explain where he's off to, and the excuses he makes to himself; his feeling sorry afterwards, and even while he's doing it--but then, not truly.... At some time nearly everyone goes through something like this, or consciously resists it. The case shown is of a man wanting another man, but the condition is universal.
The film observes it with great sympathy and accuracy of detail. It traces all the big steps in the characters' lives of desire: the preoccupation, concealments, getaways, and so forth. These, rather than the strict time sequence, are the basis of the chronology. And so perhaps they should be. But this structure leads to some jarring rifts in the straight timeline. For instance, one of the characters meets a woman, and a scene or two later she's bearing his child. I accepted these jumps to an extent, as approximations of the characters' own perceptions of their lives, but they tended to throw me out of the film and ought to have been managed more adroitly.
I've read complaints that the film is slow. So it is, compared to films set in big cities. But it proceeds at the tempo of the Western towns where it's set and of the Westerners who live in them. If they moved faster, their actions would not only be unlifelike but would be robbed of their meaning.
Where the film falls shorter is in the leading performances. The two actors are agreeable, but not good enough for their roles (or the roles weren't right for them). To be sure, the script doesn't give these enough definition, but the actors don't fill in the spaces. And they don't seem quite right otherwise. They don't seem of the place or of the period; in their scenes together, they don't seem to know each other or to be with each other. (In scenes with some other characters, they do.) Most crucially, they don't communicate any desire for each other, which is what the story turns on. In their sexual scenes, one has to infer this. And the action itself (as usual in sexual scenes) tells almost nothing about them.
Perhaps the director or the screenwriters did intend the film to be about homosexuality. The last reel, approximately, so suggests. It takes a different, more sentimental direction than expected (I wonder if this was added on to the original short story). A more logical close might have been for one partner to lose his desire, or to feel it swamping him so much he had to give it up. The film's close isn't about desire at all; it's about love. To be sure, there's a relation between the two, but the film doesn't make clear what it is, or how we got to one from the other, so that the new facts we learn about the characters in this section feel like footnotes.
The town settings at the beginning are almost painfully authentic in their quietness, the sharp sunlight, the cold heat of the air and the sun. I only stopped believing when the actors stepped in.
The mountain is never as real as the town. Probably that's because its meanings are never communicated in visual terms. The narrative meaning is probably a literary one that no actual place could measure up to; the emotional meaning could be caught, but only with effort. It would have to grow out of the characters' everyday interactions with the place, first in their work and then, gradually, in their personal relations. But the details of these are scamped, so that we only glimpse, but never feel, the atmosphere unique to the place: the bite of the wind, the hardness of the ground, the steepness of the climb to the grazing field, the denseness of the herd; then, the relative comforts of the camp and, even more, the tent; and finally, the releasing of an urge that's been straining at its cinches, and the association of that freedom with the place where it happened. Some films achieve that kind of identification of landscape with interior feeling.
But first must come the feeling.