Reply #32: If it was a better movie, the sex scene wouldn't matter. Unfortunately,

[Peace Patriot]

it's not a very good movie, and the sex scene in the tent is about all it has going for it, besides the staggeringly beautiful mountain settings in which it is filmed. I found the story and the characters immensely boring, for the most part.

Back in the 1930s, Hollywood and the U.S. went through similar Puritan stupidity, with what was called the Hayes Code, and edited out Jane Wyman's nude scene (swimming in a pond) in "The Lost Horizon." But it's such a great movie that it didn't matter. The notion of the movie that Shangri La was a pristine refuge from a greedy, war-weary world was only slightly harmed by the editing out of this beautiful scene. It made the idea a little more intellectual, but it was still the pervasive idea of the film, expressed in a hundred different ways in the story, dialogue, characters and setting. The editing itself was comparable to throwing a blanket over, say, the Venus de Milo, or Michelangelo's David--just a stupid act of Puritan vandalism that could not really affect the overwhelming force of enlightened ideas that those statues, or movies like "The Lost Horizon," represent.

Brokeback Mountain, on the other hand, represents what? The idea that forbidden homosexual sex will get you killed, or ruin your life? That it's an obsession, a sickness, that is inherently destructive of family life? That it's grabby and violent and selfish? That there is nothing beautiful or sensual about it? That its depiction requires staggeringly beautiful mountain scenery to compensate for its gracelessness and lack of beauty? That those who commit it are almost completely inarticulate, uninteresting, unintelligent and unconscious persons, steeped in an ugly, repressive culture that they never question?

So, cutting the big sex scene out of THIS movie does it great harm. Because that's pretty much all it's about: furtive sex that gets punished.

I thought there were a couple of good performances in it--but I often see actors rise above lousy scripts and the intentions of funders and producers. In this case, the actors cannot compensate for the poverty of ideas in this production, nor for the very poor quality of the script. And without the sex scene in the tent, even its meager notion of forbidden sex creating unhappiness and ruination in a repressive culture, cannot be fully grasped.