A Single Man (12A.)
Directed by Tom Ford.
Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena. 100 mins
Some actors go out and hunt down a role, laden themselves with preparation and accents and hairpieces. Some though prefer to sit back and wait for the role to come to them; the thespian equivalent of working from home.
Colin Firth is definitely one of the later so it’s not a surprise that Firth playing a gay man, turns out to be very much like Firth playing anyone else: calm, controlled, stringing audiences along with a few well spaced out glimpses of the emotions lurking within. When that emotion is suicidal grief, this gradual release is immensely powerful.
Repressed, restrained and immaculately turned out, he resembles a BBC News announcer of the bowtie era who’s been dressed up as Marcello Mastroianni. It’s 1962; George is an English lecturer at a university in California overwhelmed by the death of his partner of sixteen years (Goode.) After eight months of bereavement he’s has decided to end it all and is just making it through his last day.
First time director Tom Ford comes to us from the evil empire of fashion where, when he wasn’t designing classy clobber, he was filming Gucci adverts, the Leni Riefenstahl of body fascism. It goes without saying that this adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood story looks fantastic. The period detail is so obsessively controlled it makes BBC4’s Mad Men look slovenly and thrown together in comparison.
The film’s poignancy is in the distance between the gleam of the surfaces and the gloom of the inner life that can no longer match it. The film will be rejected by some as posy and shallow, or just far too precious and self conscious to bear but I’d counter that it was one of the most success attempts to translate literary prose to the screen.
Directed by Tom Ford.
Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena. 100 mins
Some actors go out and hunt down a role, laden themselves with preparation and accents and hairpieces. Some though prefer to sit back and wait for the role to come to them; the thespian equivalent of working from home.
Colin Firth is definitely one of the later so it’s not a surprise that Firth playing a gay man, turns out to be very much like Firth playing anyone else: calm, controlled, stringing audiences along with a few well spaced out glimpses of the emotions lurking within. When that emotion is suicidal grief, this gradual release is immensely powerful.
Repressed, restrained and immaculately turned out, he resembles a BBC News announcer of the bowtie era who’s been dressed up as Marcello Mastroianni. It’s 1962; George is an English lecturer at a university in California overwhelmed by the death of his partner of sixteen years (Goode.) After eight months of bereavement he’s has decided to end it all and is just making it through his last day.
First time director Tom Ford comes to us from the evil empire of fashion where, when he wasn’t designing classy clobber, he was filming Gucci adverts, the Leni Riefenstahl of body fascism. It goes without saying that this adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood story looks fantastic. The period detail is so obsessively controlled it makes BBC4’s Mad Men look slovenly and thrown together in comparison.
The film’s poignancy is in the distance between the gleam of the surfaces and the gloom of the inner life that can no longer match it. The film will be rejected by some as posy and shallow, or just far too precious and self conscious to bear but I’d counter that it was one of the most success attempts to translate literary prose to the screen.
