Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (13 March 2006)

Kudos to Ang Lee and everyone involved in the making of this incredible work of art. Its impact, though slow-burning, hit me with full force and broke me literally to pieces when it came full circle. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist stayed with me for days after watching the movie, as if being persons I actually knew. Sounds esoteric, but everyone who ever made friends with movie characters as a kid (i.e. with a certain turtle-necked extraterrestrial) knows what I'm talking about. Well, I guess that comparison doesn't really hold, but you know... it's just awesome to have a film do that to me again after a long time of grown-up resistance against the blurring of the borders between art and real life.
In short: This is movie-making at its purest and finest, slow-paced, but highly resonant in each single frame, with a story not driven by incident, forced melodrama and the writer's apparent wish to make everything fit in a profound statement (hello there, 'Crash'), but simply by characters stuck in themselves and their own existence, with every throwback in their constant pursuit of happiness being a result not only of society's shortcomings (in an intense flashback the film reveals a shocking glimpse of the outcome of a hate crime) but of their own inability to really accept the nature of their desire. Depressing stuff this might be, but the director's humanist approach to it, with it's loving gaze on all his characters, makes it not only bearable, but a truly cathartic experience for the viewer.
As you may have already noticed I would recommend you badly to see this film - it truly deserves any audience it gets, and it might even change a few minds, let alone lives, along the way... as it is, in case you hadn't known, a love story between two men, transcending the queer movie as well as the Hollywood romance.
Not to be missed, 11 out of 10