Cast: Colin Firth, Julianna Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult
Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Studio: Artina Films/Fade to Black
Running-time: 101 mins
Genre: Drama/Adaptation
Country: USA
Imagine this - in an alternate universe located somewhere between platforms of glittering catwalks and lofty billboards, anybody who occupied the high altars of fashion could easily pull silken strings and make a super-stylised art-film-fart filled with impossibly beautiful, genetic-laboratory-specified people. The result could have been an over-preening, self-conscious, self-aggrandising piece of lunkhead, tailored to fit the equally superficial industry of physical glamour. Let's face it, all the Lagerfelds, Versaces, Karans could do this, and Tom Ford is one of them. But instead of making a Warholian art-trash project, fashion designer guru Tom Ford, saviour of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, purveyor of sharp suits, golden grooming and unapologetic Vanity Fair spreads with naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, crafts a solemn, sensitive film about grief and mortality, courtesy of Christopher Isherwood's novel of the same name A Single Man. Of course, this isn't without handsome people and perfectly tailored wardrobe, the film is consciously rife with it. What's remarkable in A Single Man is that there's actually profundity in its proceedings, despite of its fashion-conscious mise-en-scene and cinematography that occasionally resembles a stylish, upmarket men's aftershave advert (after its impeccably framed scenes, you'd somehow expect a perfume name would rise at the after-credits, Gorgeous Mourning by Tom Ford). Beautifully shot that it resembles a Wong Kar Wai mood-piece set in Los Angeles; the banality of daily life shot in washed-out, grey-and-tan hues as Colin Firth's grieving, homosexual English professor George Falconer tries to go through what seems to be his last day on this earthen wasteland, and then becomes vibrantly, cinematically alive when he reflects on old, happy memories with his long-time partner Jim (a good Matthew Goode). It's a wise, stylistic choice, also reminiscent to an early shades of Godard, playing with colours and using them meaningfully to represent moods and emotional temperatures. Ford, as it seems, knows his film canon.
But, of course, for a film debut, there are gaffes. Fashion commercial argument aside, there are elements in the story that appears to be some big, prurient joke. A Single Man comes very close to implying that it's perfectly alright to lose a lover in a fatal car accident, because there's always a beautiful stranger around, specifically a James Dean lookalike, hanging outside your local off-license, or a pretty-boy student in your class, ever attentive and is more interested in the lecturer rather than the lecture itself. This is mainly nitpicking, as both characters serves as George's escapism and also a reminder that life is worth living, in one way or another. Thanks, then, to Julianne Moore's brilliant recreation Charley, George's best friend, showing off her London socialite tongue, giving the film a sense of human balance. Charley is the Yang to George's Yin; impulsive, emotionally uncontrolled, unsettled divorcee, forever wasting on Gauloise and alcohol whereas George is the repressed and refined one, a man who once truly loved and then lost someone. Colin Firth, in a decade's worth of typecasting, has finally found a role that is perfectly tailored and groomed for him, embodying a man whose lament on life and shattering grief is considerably a private matter, drifting through his last day as it were an ordinary one. Firth's Englishness is an ace, a testament to human stoicism in the midst of a personal storm.
A visually accomplished, nuanced and stylish mood-piece in the shades of Wong Kar Wai and Jean-Luc Godard, and that's enough comparison which Tom Ford should be proud of. It might look swish, all glossed and groomed up, but A Single Man is no kitsch, trash stuff out from the world of fashion. It's a sombre, sensitive study of love's labour's lost, of private grief, albeit a gorgeously mounted one with an impeccable turn from Firth.
Review by The Moviejerk © Janz
