[Source: BBC NEWS]

Twenty years ago, Ang Lee’s drama about the love between two male sheep herders was finally released after a long struggle to get it made.

It was a watershed moment for gay representation that balanced playing by Hollywood’s rules and changing them.

When it was released in 2005, Brokeback Mountain entered the collective consciousness in a way that is vanishingly rare for a film with queer subject matter.

Even non-cinephiles would have been aware of the “gay cowboy movie”, as it was often described in the press, and the subsequent controversy when it lost the Academy Award for best picture to Crash, a clumsy crime film that now regularly appears on lists of the worst Oscar winners ever.

Brokeback Mountain did take home three Oscars, including a prestigious best director prize for Ang Lee, and remains a beloved gay touchstone.

Actor Paul Mescal recently complained that it feels “lazy and frustrating” to compare his upcoming film The History of Sound, a period romance in which he and Josh O’Connor play travelling lovers in rural Maine, to Lee’s tender neo-Western about romantically attracted sheep herders Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Whether you agree with Mescal or not, the persistent comparisons are a sign of Brokeback Mountain’s enduring impact and popularity.

Indeed, to mark its 20th anniversary, Lee’s film is now being re-released in US cinemas this week for a limited engagement.

Adapted by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain was a relatively novel proposition back in 2004.

“The fact its two leads were handsome A-list male stars and [it showed] their characters in a romantic story together was groundbreaking,” says Tim Teeman, author of In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master. This view is broadly echoed by queer film critic Manuel Betancourt, author of Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies, who says the film’s success with critics and audiences alike felt like the start of a “new era of gay representation [on screen]”.

At the time, Brokeback Mountain looked like a surprising pivot from director Ang Lee, who had recently made the 2003 superhero film Hulk, though his other directing credits ranged from an acclaimed Jane Austen adaptation (1995’s Sense and Sensibility) to a hugely successful martial arts film (2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

The film’s core cast was a quartet of hotly-tipped rising stars in their twenties: Ledger and Anne Hathaway would go on to win Oscars for subsequent roles, while Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams are rarely far from the awards season conversation.

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.