A SINGLE MAN

Director: Tom Ford
Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult
Run Time: 99 minutes
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Language: English
Rating: PG (Nudity)

Tom Ford’s historical importance (to date) rests in part on his unique collaborations with the late twentieth century’s great commercial photographers: Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and so on. With them, he championed the idea that style could govern our memories, without an appeal to straightforward nostalgia. Evidence of this same balance of past and present can also be found in the clothes he famously created at Gucci. Ford drew from the past in ways that clearly distinguish tribute from innovation, evoking both technological change and the timeless truths of the human form.

In his first feature film, a crowd-wowing Special Presentation at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival®, Ford continues along this rich and aesthetically complex pathway. The setting is Southern California and our moment in time is officially the early sixties. We meet George Falconer (Colin Firth, Easy Virtue, Dorian Gray), a gay college professor, as he learns that his lover Jim (Matthew Goode, Match Point, Brideshead Revisited) has died in a car wreck. Grief overwhelms him, and his “invisible status” in society begins to close in again. Suicide seems the best way out. But a mad night with Charley (Julianne Moore, Blindness, Chloe), his best girlfriend from England, and the unexpected attentions of an angora-sweater-clad young man make George think twice.

Based on a late-career Christopher Isherwood novel, told largely through flashback and featuring alarmingly precise attention to period detail in furniture, costume and architecture, A Single Man could easily have felt like a throwback, a work of atavism. But Ford pulls this pre-AIDS tale of gay love and loss into our age by reminding us, again, of what is eternal in life, love and how we choose to forgive. The film deliberately reveals how George pulls himself from the narcissism of self-sacrifice to an understanding of his value to the world and the people around him. A Single Man confirms this artist’s ongoing impact on our culture and our awareness of our place within it.

“Fashion designer Tom Ford gets it spectacularly right first time round in his directorial debut, A Single Man . . . It also represents  a quantum leap for Colin Firth, who gives his most nuanced, compelling performance to date in the lead role.” – Lee Marshall, Screen International

Reviews: www.metacritic.com/film/titles/singleman

Official site www.asingleman-movie.com