"Just get through the goddamned day: bit melodramatic, perhaps, but then again, my heart has been broken. Feel as if I’m drowning, sinking, can’t breathe."
Tom Ford’s début feature, an adaptation from of the Christopher Isherwood novel A Single Man, is a mood piece not unlike Wong Kar Wai at his best - all that smoking, the evocative soundtrack and the fey closeups! It's polished and assured, and without a beginner's stumble, if slight and glossy like a fashion pictorial.
The wonderful Colin Firth plays George, a literature prof in LA of 1962; In truth, I have never understood Mr Firth until this. His lover, the impossibly dreamy Matthew Goode, has died in a car crash. The day-in-the-life is barely a plot, and much of the movie is a gleaming haze; The characters are all dressed immaculately of the period, all beautiful. Yet I loved it. The film is saved from over-fabulousness by weighty performances: Firth demos how a person is tightened and undone by grief, and Julianne Moore explains the fag hag in all her fragile strength. The two model boys kept me agog: Nicholas Hoult, 20, as the precocious (definitive!) twink is etched in my mind, holding up amazingly well against Mr Firth. And model Jon K, at the liqour store car park, is as beautiful an apparition as the angel Gabriel (this scene should be a movie all its own!). The film slow burns with beauty, with the majestic set pieces of Mr Firth's acting. When he learns of Goode’s death in a phone call, his voice and his face tell the entire tale.
Unexpectedly, it's worth watching again.
Tom Ford’s début feature, an adaptation from of the Christopher Isherwood novel A Single Man, is a mood piece not unlike Wong Kar Wai at his best - all that smoking, the evocative soundtrack and the fey closeups! It's polished and assured, and without a beginner's stumble, if slight and glossy like a fashion pictorial.
The wonderful Colin Firth plays George, a literature prof in LA of 1962; In truth, I have never understood Mr Firth until this. His lover, the impossibly dreamy Matthew Goode, has died in a car crash. The day-in-the-life is barely a plot, and much of the movie is a gleaming haze; The characters are all dressed immaculately of the period, all beautiful. Yet I loved it. The film is saved from over-fabulousness by weighty performances: Firth demos how a person is tightened and undone by grief, and Julianne Moore explains the fag hag in all her fragile strength. The two model boys kept me agog: Nicholas Hoult, 20, as the precocious (definitive!) twink is etched in my mind, holding up amazingly well against Mr Firth. And model Jon K, at the liqour store car park, is as beautiful an apparition as the angel Gabriel (this scene should be a movie all its own!). The film slow burns with beauty, with the majestic set pieces of Mr Firth's acting. When he learns of Goode’s death in a phone call, his voice and his face tell the entire tale.
Unexpectedly, it's worth watching again.
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