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| Director Ang Lee collected a Golden Lion for
Brokeback Mountain, which took top honors at this year's Venice Film
Festival. |
Ang Lee's tale of the homosexual love between two cowboys set in the
conservative West of the 1960s won the Venice Film Festival's top award
Saturday.
Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake
Gyllenhaal, topped 19 other competitors, including favorite Good Night,
and Good Luck, George Clooney's black-and-white movie set in the McCarthy
era of the early 1950s.
Receiving the Golden Lion award, Lee described his movie as a "great
American love story" that is "unique and so universal."
"I'm so glad it's prevailed here and was received so warmly here," he
said.
Based on a novella by The Shipping News author E. Annie Proulx, the
movie has sweeping vistas, lonesome men, bucking broncos and smoldering
campfires. It also has sex scenes between two men whose lives are changed,
disturbed and entwined after being hired to tend sheep for a summer in
Wyoming.
Lee's other films include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,Hulk,The Ice
Storm and Sense and Sensibility.
One of the stars of Clooney's film, David
Strathairn, got the top acting award for men. Strathairn played American
broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, who systematically scrutinized
the methods of Sen.
Joseph McCarthy's quest to root out communists and their sympathizers.
Strathairn said the movie was a reminder of the responsibility of
journalists, addressing his remarks to "all of you here, and all of those
who will see this movie, all of those who are out there trying to bring
truth to all of us so that we can make better decisions about our lives."
The top acting award for a woman went to Italian actress Giovanna
Mezzogiorno for her role in the movie La Bestia nel Cuore (The Beast in
the Heart).
The film tells the story of an apparently happy woman who suddenly is
plagued by dreams that reveal a dark part of her childhood, when she was
abused by her father. She eventually uncovers her past with help from her
brother. It is based on a 2004 book by Cristina Comencini, who also
directed the movie.
The Silver Lion for directing went to Philippe Garrel for his film Les
Amants Reguliers (The Regular Lovers),
French actress Isabelle Huppert was given a special award for her
contributions to cinema, and Italian Stefania Sandrelli received a
lifetime achievement award.
Clooney and Grant Heslov took the prize for best script for Good Night,
in which Clooney plays a principled and practical CBS television producer,
Fred Friendly, who later became a professor at Columbia University and
encouraged a generation of journalists to ponder responsibility and
ethics.
The festival's special jury prize went to the movie Mary, by Abel
Ferrara.
(Agencies) | 
Updated: 2005-09-12 09:39
