Lee’s gay cowboys stirrup Venice

SENSE And Sensibility director Ang Lee has risked the wrath of right-wing America with his latest film unveiled at the Venice Film Festival yesterday - Brokeback Mountain, the story of cowboys in love.

Oscar-winning director Lee adapted the film from a short story which appeared in The New Yorker in 1997.

The film, about a relationship between a ranch hand and rodeo cowboy, could mean the smashing of Hollywood’s last taboo.

The film, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, is up for the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

Taiwan-born Lee, who made the film after seven years of other directors toying with the idea, described the movie, which contains a sex scene between the two men, as “a great American love story”.

Set in the 1960s, it is based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author E Annie Proulx, of hidden sexuality in the American West.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s characters fall in love while working as sheep herders in the majestic Brokeback Mountain.

At the summer’s end, the pair return to their normal lives - and both marry.

Four years later they meet again, and their relationship is secretly rekindled.

The Calgary Gay Rodeo Association advised and consulted the production and also appear in several sequences.

Björk’s latest project was also launched and it is typically eccentric - a film which sees humans turn into whales.

Björk’s conceptual artist boyfriend Matthew Barney created the film, while the Icelandic-born singer stars with him in it, and has composed the soundtrack.

Drawing Restraint 9 was shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese ship Nisshin Maru, the mother ship of the Japanese whaling fleet.

Björk and Barney play two visitors on the ship, who the audience first see on board, groomed, bathed and dressed in mammal fur costumes.

Later their bodies turn into whales, apparently suggesting rebirth.

Björk drew on everything from the movie Jaws to the atom bomb to compose the typically offbeat soundtrack.

Asked about working together today, Björk, wearing an apricot-coloured dress, said: “I guess when we first met we decided not to work together.

“Look at us now. We planted seeds for five years without having anything in mind... then we started to do this it was harvest time... they were popping out.”