A Single Man

A startling surprise. Tom Ford's debut as a director tells, in exquisite images, a very personal story, based on a short story by Christopher Isherwood. What makes everything fly so high is a fantastic performance by Colin Firth. I've followed Colin Firth career from the very beginning "Tumbledown", "Another Country", "Apartment Zero" where he creates a character never seen on the screen before or since, "Pride and Prejudice" where he reinvented D'Arcy's character, "Fever Pitch" where he showed a new face in riveting tragicomic strokes. So I should have been prepared for something new and special and maybe I was but the effect his performance in "A Single Man" had on me was (is) totally unexpected. It changed my perception of things, it made me look inwards and think of things I had put aside. I can't wait to see it again. I saw the look of love and that look remains knocking in my mind as if to keep me awake and aware. Tom Ford takes enormous visual risks in the telling of his story. It may work for some, some others will certainly dismiss or ridicule. I, for one, stand up and applaud.

A stunning outing for Tom Ford. The images are, clearly, out of an aesthete's mind without being shallow, ever. I believe there is a dramatic reason behind every frame. Colin Firth, looking truly handsome, goes through a day of torment with remarkable civility. I felt involved and shaken and couldn't help but make mine his pain. The flashbacks with Matthew Goode are truly vivid and truthful. This is a step forward in explaining through images that love is love no matter who you are, where you come from or what your circumstances are. It could have been a man and a woman, the fact that it's a man and a man is almost irrelevant. We recognize the feel of it and Colin Firth's performance is the magic stroke that makes that not only possible but natural. It is a sensational debut for fashion star Tom Ford. True to himself an artist that promises great, wonderful things for the future. I can't wait.

I've seen "A Single Man" twice already at different screenings and I believe I will see it again and again. Yes, for me is one of those films. Thank you Tom Ford and thank you Colin Firth. I love Colin and my favorite performance of his dates back to 1989 "Apartment Zero". George Falconer, Colin's character in "A Single Man" seems to me the flip side of Adrian Leduc, Colin's character in "Apartment Zero". George has had a real life and grieves the death of his companion. Adrian Leduc never had a companion and his grief is based on his total inability to connect with people. George believes that human connection is at the center of everything and puts that thought into practice. Adrian worships James Dean, George doesn't think that much of James Dean, he actually says it. Adrian wears white shirts made of cheap material and he launders them himself. George wears impeccably cut white shirts that he has professionally laundered. They seem tiny details but they become overwhelming when you know both characters. George even hurts himself and wears a band aid just like Adrian during the last 15 minutes of "Apartment Zero" I love Colin Firth because he's an actor that can give you so much doing, seemingly, so little. It compel us to participate and include our own thoughts and feelings. The love of George for his lover is as pungent and real as anything I've ever seen on the screen. It is a cinematic triumph and as I'm writing about it I feel a sort of urge to see it again, just as it happened to me when I saw "Apartment Zero" for the first time. I felt then that Colin deserved an Oscar nomination for Adrian, he will get it for George. This is the first comment I ever wrote and it comes out of a profound need to share this emotion. When movies can do that, film lovers all over the world have real reason to celebrate and I'm celebrating.

Depression overwhelms a college professor on the anniversary of his boyfriend's tragic death in this drama written and directed by Tom Ford. As per Ford's latter 'Nocturnal Animals', this is a visually arresting and finely acted motion picture, further topped off with a superb Golden Globe nominated score. While some of Ford's imagery is a little ostentatious, he shows perfect restrain at other points, allowing Colin Firth to emote silently in close-up during a flashback in which he hears the news of his boyfriend's death by phone. Ford's use of slow motion as Firth drives along, watching neighbourhood kids and others works very well too; one truly gets the sense of Firth using the day to contemplate whether he can go on living or whether he should poetically end it all. There is, however, no escaping how slim the narrative is and not all of the subplots that crop up necessarily gel. Julianne Moore's turn as his best friend adds surprisingly little to his journey, except for some unanswered questions about their past together. It is hard to know what to make of Jon Kortajarena's gigolo either, however, Nicholas Hoult has a nice turn with a lot of suggestiveness as one of Firth's students with an unusual interest in him. Indeed, while all the little bits and pieces here might not necessarily add up, the experience of 'A Single Man' resonates long after it is over.

It was French poet and writer Lamartine who said "one person is missing and the whole word seems depopulated". George Falconer lives in such a world as he's mourning the man who has shared his life for sixteen years... and the grieving process has taken him to an existential dead-end. His Jim (Matthew Goode) whom we see lying in a snowy road after a car accident was more than a life companion but a soul-mate. With him, George had found as perfect contentment as perfect could get, and with that tragic accident, a part of himself died too; the loss is so overwhelming that George intends to kill himself. Colin Firth is the titular single man, resigned to end a life that has lost all purpose.

It is a bleak introduction to Tom Ford's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel, a powerful examination of the struggle to get over a loss but what would you expect from a movie whose first screen title is "Fade to Black"? The movie is emotionally loaded and restrains itself so much you can sense the electricity before the storm, but we get to have a few sunny flashbacks to understand that George wasn't born a misanthropic sourpuss. That the film features a same-sex couple is almost incidental, there's no sex scene and the smaller moments the better: a cozy conversation on a sofa, a discussion about the past in a beach, yet "A Single Man" couldn't have been as powerful with a man and a woman and for that, you can't do without the film's context.

The story is set in the midst of the Cuba missiles crisis when the world's future was hanging on a thread and America was the leader of the Free World, but with a rather selective approach of freedom as far as personal lifestyles went. A man couldn't live his sexuality if it wasn't the "right one", living as a homosexual was an ordeal in the public sphere and in private, it was tougher to find someone. Yet George found one and could conceal under a façade of pure clean-cut British rigidity his real self. With Jim, he found not just love but authenticity in a world that relied too much on slogans (mostly political), appearances and hypocrisy. It's interesting that the couple in this film can work as a metaphor for being free or true to our nature under a society not much traditional as it was reactionary (American values against the Red Scare).

There's an important scene where George lectures his student about fear, using World War II and racism as examples, and the notion of fear is connected to causes that can be either real or factice. The point is that everything has a cause, not all the causes are real, but they exist as fabricated. What matters then is the truth, tending to it, whether through History or from experience: one of his student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) hates the past and is scared by the future (during the Cuban crisis, many people were), what's left from it? Maybe the present and the way it might build him to his own realizations and understanding of the world. This is basically the premise of that harrowing journey where George contemplates his life and the probability of its termination.

And if anything, the film isn't about the struggles of homosexuals in the 60s, though there are references to the prevailing homophobia, it's about someone who lost the balance of his life, the personal tunnel to his own truth, the link between the present and the future, and condemned himself to isolation then suicide because there was no future to conceive with anyone. He has a friend named Charley (Julianne Moore), she's divorced, disillusioned about life, but she loves him and for all the joyful and fun moments they spend together (Firth and Moore have great chemistry), George can't connect the present with her to any bright vision of the future. The film says something about the value of the present as one step that makes you climb the stairs of your life. It's only after he meets again Kenny, the student who admires him (and a little more) that he starts feeling the stairs can be worth climbing.

But that's only an interpretation of the story, one must take the film at face value and appreciate its "present"; a man drowning in an ocean of loneliness that gives its full meaning to the title, so isolated a man that he actually raises the interest of people around him because -and maybe George doesn't realize it himself- he's still part of his world. The film makes no secret about George's planned suicide but it's expressed in an interesting way: he lives the last day at its fullest, staring at muscular tennis players' bodies as if he was photographing them in his mind, a beautiful blonde girl's hair, he caresses a dog who reminds him of his friend's. These moments are so intense that it might leave the impression that Tom Ford over-designed his film, made it too stylish for its own good as if he was trying to channel Bergman.

I didn't mind that actually, it's interesting that the more intensely George looked at his world, the more it meant his preparation to death, looking at the pink smog of L.A., he says that even the ugliest thing have a beautiful side, as if people focused on beauty had the ugliest thoughts and missed the best part of what living is about. When he meets the young Spanish model, it's romantic in an artificial and abrupt way, when he meets Kenny again, they go swimming, the present doesn't reveal any truth but shows him a way like it almost saved his life at a tragicomic moment involving a gun and the right pillow position to pull the trigger. If you can't envision a bright future, trust the present's small moments to take you there...