There’s not a lot they have in common apart from separation

There’s not a lot they have in common, apart from separation. And the best story of all in the book is “Brokeback Mountain”, about two cowboys who become lovers, and how that rules, and breaks, and illumines their harsh lives. There may be a movie of it one day, directed by Gus Van Sant And John Travolta is filming The Shipping News. But, even with the best intentions, Hollywood could make Proulx as cute as a Laramie hairdo. So read it, and see that, while Wyoming weather is dangerous enough, it’s feelings will get you. Take your chances.’Close Range’ (Fourth Estate, pounds 12) is published on 10 June Left: Annie Proulx.

As a child she was ‘tall and skinny – I could see over everyone’s head It made me feel smart and observant. I felt everything was laid out for me to look at – that life was the unwinding scroll of things for my delectation’. Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Inheritors is set in rural Austria during the early 1930s (it’s in German, with subtitles) A farmer dies and leaves his property to his workers. This is not as kind as it might seem; in fact, it is an act of violence. The country hierarchy – farmers and peasants and everybody knowing their place and living in a kind of hurt silence – is stiff and set. The farmer, unpleasant when alive, knew that this gift of freedom would cause scraps and worse in the community he left behind He was right.

The local burghers rage, and predict a bloody climax to the situation. “Peasants must not be farmers,” says Danninger the rich neighbouring farmer, all sag belly and mean gob The workers are initially amazed at their freedom. Ruzowitzky has them sitting about the kitchen wondering what to do with their Sunday Perhaps they should smoke a pipe, chat even. Eventually two of the girls slope off to milk the cows – it’s a beautifully observed manipulation of the notion of truancy. There’s much in this film that reminded me of Lord of the Flies. Like Golding, Ruzowitzky examines the desperation that attends being liberated from your known world.

Life for these people before their inheritance was a routine of early mornings, occasional beatings, sweating in the fields, gobbled suppers and leaning their heads against the flanks of cows at milking time and breathing in the smell of dunged straw – effort and calm. Now they must work to keep the farm solvent, but work out of choice, and for profits shared. Everything suddenly feels untried and precarious to them – choice equals pressure.
The Inheritors was last year’s Austrian nominee for Best Foreign Film Oscar. Ostensibly Ruzowitzky sets out to play with the Germanic “Heimat” genre, films that idealised rural life to an almost ludicrous extent, particularly during the inter-war years. So The Inheritors, with its blank silences and yelling and exposing of the rottenness of exploitation is very much a revisionist film (although not the first of its kind).But really, it’s a western It deals with people’s passion for earth. It has a protagonist in its most vocal peasant, Lukas (Simon Schwarz), who is blonde and clear-minded and determined to defend his property and tumble prejudice. He echoes James Dean in Giant by repeating “Nobody is ever going to beat me again”, and then stands fingering the tips of his barley like an astonished pioneer.It’s an incredibly controlled film.