"
arit Allen, who has died aged 66 of a brain aneurism, pulled off a powerful use of movie-costume-as-character in the scene in
Brokeback Mountain (2005) in which a lone drifter discovers, in the family homestead of his dead lover, the shirts they wore while cowboying together long before: shabby denim and weary cotton wrapped in each other's arms.
"Director Ang Lee could not have entrusted those crucial garments to a better pair of hands. Allen's uncommon strength in supplying costumes for more than 40 productions was in telling a story through clothes. She could run off the major period frock (post-crinoline
Scarlett O'Hara for a 1994 TV sequel to
Gone with the Wind) along with extreme fantasy (the Incredible Hulk's expanding purple pants in 2003), but they were always grounded in and surrounded by reality."
=thanks= Fran