Photo By Focus Features

(L-R) Ennis Del Maar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are a pair young cowboys who fall in love in Brokeback Mountain, director Ang Lee's latest well- received Toronto Film Festival effort.

Toronto -- Actor Jake Gyllenhaal insists he's speaking from experience when he leans forward from his hotel room chair at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and sums up his philosophy of love. He offers one catchall question: If you find true love, how can you let it go? His new movie, Brokeback Mountain, one of four Gyllenhaal films that will play cinemas before the end of the year, backs up his words.

Two young cowboys, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), are cash poor enough to take lowly work tending sheep on top of Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. It's the early 1960s, and the two men spend the summer alone on the mountain's grazing area. Their time together leads to friendship and eventually a passionate love affair that is deep, real and timeless.

But the private Ennis warns Jack about displaying their love in public. He tells his newfound lover that it's the wrong time and the wrong place for gay men to be open.

So they keep their romance a secret. They leave Brokeback Mountain and move on with their lives. Jack marries a pretty rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway) and settles down in Texas. Ennis remains in rural Wyoming and marries his longtime girlfriend (Michelle Williams).

They often reunite, usually at Brokeback Mountain, to continue their affair in secret. But theirs is not a happy ending: They never get to realize their love openly or spend their total lives together. If Brokeback Mountain exemplifies Gyllenhaal's feelings about love, then heartache plays an equal role with happiness.

As Gyllenhaal sits down to be interviewed in a tidy Toronto hotel room, Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee is making a quick turnaround flight from the Venice Film Festival, where he has collected the Golden Lion Award on behalf of the film. The critical response has been loud and positive, and Gyllenhaal takes great pride in the award. For him, the film offers audiences a lost myth about the most mythical of American spaces -- the American West.

"I think it's radically new and radically different," Gyllenhaal says. "It is not a cliché love story."

Asked if times have changed since the film's setting, Gyllenhaal shrugs. He says it's a hard question to answer, but he's not optimistic.

"If they (people) were ready for it, I don't think the film would be a great piece of artistic work," he says. "I think people often make movies that people are ready for, and these movies come and go. I don't think people are ready for it, and that's what makes it a great work of art.

"I look at this story as author Annie Proulx walking in the forest, and she comes and finds a book under a tree and discovers one of the last myths that has never been told. It's odd that it's never been told, but it hasn't."

Other filmmakers sought to make Brokeback Mountain before Lee. In fact, Gyllenhaal met with another filmmaker years ago about an attempt that never materialized.

Gyllenhaal grew older and more experienced as an actor. Age came to his boyish face, and he became ready to experience the role of his career with Lee, the acclaimed director of such diverse fare as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm.

Screenwriters Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana adapt Proulx's 1997 short story into an epic movie romance set in 1960s Wyoming, but the film was shot in Calgary, Alberta. To Lee's credit, it still looks like the American West. There have been allusions to Howard Hawks' Red River and the deep male friendship in that movie. Brokeback is a western, but it is also the most intimate film Lee has made to date. If Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu had made an American western, it would resemble Brokeback Mountain.

In the film's most haunting scene, Ennis tells Jack that the time is not right to reveal their relationship, and Lee admits that he's unsure whether the time is right in America for his movie.

"This was never the wrong place," he says. "In fact, the place helped it happen. They had privacy on Brokeback. But it was the wrong time, and I think this is a scary time in the U.S., more so than any time I remember, and I have lived in America for 22 years."

While he feels good about the response in Venice, he's still worried about the film's impending commercial life.

"I don't know if this is the right time to do this movie, but I did it for the love of it, and I hope the love story will prevail," Lee says, sitting on a sofa, speaking with a hushed voice. "It is harder and harder to tell love stories because people are so jaded. Globally things are better about gay love, but in the U.S. it is conservative."

Lee was born and raised in Taiwan, but he came to the U.S. to attend college at the University of Illinois in Champaigne-Urbana and later at New York University. His first film, Pushing Hands, came out in 1992. Since then his career has been prolific and noteworthy.

Lee says he was always a fan of westerns, but he had a lot to learn. He mentions familiar names, masters of the genre: Boetticher, Hawks and, of course, John Ford. But Brokeback is also an art film, and Lee credits Bergman, neo-realism, De Sica and Ozu.

Before getting up to talk with some visiting friends, the director refers to something Gyllenhaal said the previous afternoon: Brokeback is about the courage to love.

Photo By Focus Features

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain finds the distinguished director back in more intimate environs following his experiment in big-budget bombast, Hulk.

Jack Twist is about taking risks, and some say the two leads took with by doing the film. Randy Quaid puts it like this in Brokeback's press materials: "It is a courageous choice for both of these actors. They're at a critical phase of their careers, establishing themselves."

Gyllenhaal currently stars alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins in Proof, and he has director Sam Mendes' Gulf War drama, Jarhead, coming later this fall. He consistently rises above mediocre material like last year's big-budget extravaganza The Day After Tomorrow and thrives on good material like Richard Kelly's 2001 cult hit Donnie Darko.

His father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a filmmaker; his mother is a screenwriter; his sister, Maggie, enjoys equal acclaim as an actress. Jake is well aware of the Hollywood game. The wise career move would be to make movies appealing to the largest audiences. Brokeback proves he has a different agenda.

The role of Twist is Gyllenhaal's first experience playing a character over such a long expanse of time. He is equally believable as the young man, as the middle-aged Jack and as a man committed to his wife and son. Yet there is sadness behind his deep-set eyes. He wants what he cannot have -- a life with Ennis.

What Jack learns, what Gyllenhaal speaks of in Brokeback, is heartbreaking -- that not all love can be fulfilled.

"Challenging is not the right word for this movie," the 24-year-old actor says. "We all got caught in the idea of what love is supposed to be, and movies and books and stories all show love in a particular way. I know in my own life I have lived in the cliché of guy gets girl and guy loses girl and guy gets girl again. It has led to unhappiness in my life. "This film says if the outside world wasn't there and no judgment or outside opinion about who you should love or can't love, would you still be loving the person that you love today? Or would you be making other choices in your life? And if you would bring the person you love to Brokeback Mountain, would you still love them? And if you do, it's true love."