Brokeback Mountain DVD Focus Features Au Revoir Les Enfants DVD Criterion Collection King Kong DVD Universal Home Video     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	The theme of star-crossed lovers and ill-fated friends is a common one in Hollywood. Indeed, what better drama? Few things tug at the heartstrings so effectively as two who long to be together, but instead are pulled apart by the expectations of society. Three films newly released on DVD address this admittedly well-worn theme, each one in its own unique way. Brokeback Mountain, which has won cudos and enough awards worldwide to fill a saddlebag (including three Oscars), is far from the so-called gay cowboy movie. Rather, it is an intense, emotionally raw and riveting account of two young men who, despite every personal expectation and social more known to them, fall in love. In the American west of the early 1960s, these two strangers take lowly jobs herding sheep on a stunning Wyoming mountain. It's a lonely life they've chosen, one that affords little human interaction. But something clicks between them, and their lives are changed forever. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal inhabit their roles as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Ennis is a true loner. He hardly knows how to have a conversation, much less a complex relationship. His world is his thoughts, and they're verbalized only with great effort. In fact, they're as much words as grunts and groans. Communication is a painful undertaking for him. Jack, on the other hand, longs for someone to interact with, but in his life there is no one. At least, no one meaningful. Where Ennis' world is dark and quiet, Jack longs for noise, for fun, for thrills, for light and so, when his feelings for Ennis develop the way they do, he embraces them even though they terrify him. For the rest of their lives, Ennis and Jack struggle with the realities of their relationship. Each man is married, with children, so they must keep the relationship hidden, meeting every now and again in far-flung spots way out in the wilderness, where communing as they do quickly becomes almost second nature. There's no one to see them, and there's no judgment unless they bring it along in the hip pocket of their jeans. The one thing Ennis and Jack can't do is live the life their hearts feel. Despite everything, they feel bound to their world as they know it. Though neither man can admit to being gay, they do admit that the powerful pull each has on the other is as dangerous as gunpowder in their everyday world, so they spend more time apart than they can together, denying their feelings, masking them with their outer shells, which in time become little more than husks. Brokeback is a beautiful film, certainly for the performances, but also for the landscape that frames them. The scenes of the two men herding the sheep are wilderness cinematography at its best. You get lost, watching it, wanting to be there to feel the pure sunshine, the breeze, the chill of the river water. Director Ang Lee masterfully juxtaposes the wide open spaces with the tight, closed, secreted life the two men are forced to eke out together, on odd days over two decades. This is surely one of those times when quality outweighs quantity. It seems the men spend, over those years, less than a month together, but they manage to cram enough genuine feeling into them to last lifetimes. If the American west forced Jack and Ennis to live their lives a certain way, then World War II certainly did the same for Jews and their friends, family and colleagues back in the 1940s. At that time, the young Louis Malle's experiences in France would provide a trajectory for his life as an acclaimed film director, creating such films as Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, Lacombe Lucien and the tragic Au Revoir Les Enfants. Au Revoir, though fiction, chronicles Malle's experiences in France during the war, when he and a hidden Jewish boy became friends. In a Catholic school in a small French town, Julien Quinten studies and reads and tries to make friends. One day, Jean Bonnet comes to school. The new boy looks different from the others, acts different and is clearly smarter. His newness, his novelty, draws Julien's attention and they clash nervously for much of the film before they forge what becomes a natural and easy friendship. Julien is a smart kid, though, and soon enough he figures out Jean's secret: he's Jewish. When Julien make it clear to Jean that he knows, the boys open up in a new ways, and Julien discovers someone whose life is vastly different from his own. Jean hasn't seen his father in two years, for example, and his mother is in a work camp. Julien has an older brother at the same school, a mother who adores him in Paris and a too-busy father. Next to Jean's very real losses, not to mention his precarious situation, Julien's own frustrations start to seem less critical. What develops is a friendship and a perspective that each boy needs desperately at this moment. Before the film's end, Jean and the other Jewish students are found out and shipped off. Julien can watch only from a distance as his only true friend is ripped away from him, bound for the Auschwitz gas chambers. The two young actors who portray the boys are superb, saying as much with their eyes as with their dialogue. Director Malle focused most of his attention on them. The result is a spare film, with no grand gestures. Its location is closed in, limited in all but a few scenes. The tale seems to wind tighter and tighter, as the Gestapo gets inevitably closer. Au Revoir Les Enfants is a simple story, simply told. Its power surfaces gradually. In Julien's eyes, at the end, there is great loss and sadness. Anything but understanding. Those same eyes with that same expression are on display, larger than life, on the face of the ape in King Kong. This film, which could not be more different, follows this same line, contributing to the theme of forbidden love. While hardly an original idea (it's a remake of the 1933 classic), Peter Jackson's reimagining does a lot more than bring CGI to the story. In fact, the CGI is so perfectly integrated into the film that you hardly notice it. More than that: you don't even think about it. The film's emotional power is such that you never drop out and think: How did they do that? By now, we know how they did it, and it could hardly matter less. The magic of Kong is in the impossible love story between the ape and Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts. It's no more or less impossible than Ennis and Jack's relationship, or Julien and Jean's friendship. Kong and Ann simply cannot be together and forces march against them at every turn, whether in the form of Ann's lover Jack, her director Carl, or the military called into service when Kong reaches New York. Three films that couldn't seem more different, yet which are also, intriguingly, cut from the same cloth. A simply-made, deeply-felt French film from a noted master. A modern tale of forbidden love. And a cutting-edge remake of a classic love story. These films are worth watching -- and considering -- for years to come. A note about the DVDs: Extras for each varies. Brokeback gets a few behind-the-scenes documentaries, the single-disc version of Kong features a short making-of doc and a feature about a tie-in commercial for the Volkswagen Touareg (the two-disc version gets a whole lot more) and Au Revoir features just the film's trailer. | April 2006   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse and a contributing editor to January Magazine and Blue Coupe. He and his family live in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where he is hard at work on an exciting new chapter in his life.	Three films that couldn't seem more different, yet which are also, intriguingly, cut from the same cloth. A simply-made, deeply-felt French film from a noted master. A modern tale of forbidden love. And a cutting-edge remake of a classic love story. These films are worth watching -- and considering -- for years to come.