"A Single Man"

Tom Ford's A Single Man begins with urgent Hitchcockian strings and an underwater dream sequence showing a naked, toned body drifting and floating – appropriate for a movie about love and loss which all but drowns in its own gorgeousness. At its centre, there is an elegant, nuanced and sophisticated performance from Colin Firth, for whose English reticence the role is tailor-made. However, he finds himself in the midst of what sometimes looks like an ­indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men's ­cologne: Bereavement by Dior.

Based on the 1964 novel by ­Christopher Isherwood, the film ­follows an unhappy single day in the life of an unhappy single man. George Falconer, played by Firth, is an ­expatriate ­Englishman in Los Angeles, a ­bespectacled college professor teaching English literature. It is 1962, and there is fever and change in the air: the recently passed Cuban missile ­crisis has left America in a jittery mood, ­relieved but still profoundly anxious. The ­students increasingly affect the style of beatniks, bikers and bohemians, and youth ­culture is breaking through the ­suburban conformity. None of this means much to Falconer, a discreet gay man whose partner, Jim, has just died in a car accident.

    

Shock and grief have accentuated George's repressed English mannerisms. He now wears fanatically well-pressed suits and shirts, brogues buffed to a shine. George emerges every day from a handsome modernist house – whose glass walls promise an openness that George cannot personally show – and is solemnly, heart-breakingly polite to ­everyone on campus where he is ­respected and admired, but has formed no close friendships. Colin Firth's George is resplendent, almost radioactive with grief, a grief which he may not express publicly, having been debarred from Jim's funeral by the deceased's family. His swallowed despair has resulted in a painful heart condition, which George has endured as stoically as everything else. But he appears to have made a decision – that his loneliness is too much to bear. George will have this one final day at work, bid a kind of ­sensory farewell to everything in his ­existence, and then take his own life.

 

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It is an outstanding performance from Colin Firth, not especially because it is a departure for him, but because the part itself is such a perfect match for Firth's habitual and superbly calibrated ­performance register: withdrawn, pained, but sensual, with sparks of wit and fun. Matthew Goode plays Jim, his partner, seen in flashback sequences. It's another very assured appearance from Goode, albeit in an undemanding part. His American accent sounds pretty impeccable.

Julianne Moore plays George's best friend and confidante Charley, a ­fellow English expat and semi-alcoholic ­divorcee. After her appearances in Todd ­Haynes's Far From Heaven and Tom ­Kalin's Savage Grace, this role ­underlines a slight gaycentric typecasting for Moore, but like Firth she inhabits it with absolute confidence, and their friendship is touching and warm, even when George is furious to realise that Charley, in spite of everything, believes in her heart that heterosexual ­marriage is more real than gay partnership. ­Nicholas Hoult plays Kenny, a student dangerously fascinated by his charismatic lecturer.

There are some great moments. While sitting on the lavatory, George gazes wonderingly out through the bathroom window at the vignette of normal family life being played out on the neighbours' front lawn. Some kids mess around with a metal detector, find an old button; the dad emerges grumpily to go to work. They take their family relationships and domestic bliss for granted. For lonely George, these people might as well be Martians.

Later, when George is settling his ­affairs at the bank, the neighbours' little girl appears in front of him, standing on a table. Is it a hallucination? Or really happening? For me, this offbeat touch is Ford's real coup. The rest of the time, his flourishes are a little self-conscious. Ford is famously a world-beating fashion designer (filmgoers may remember the awestruck namecheck for Ford in The Devil Wears Prada, as the only person ever to have impressed Meryl Streep's scary Anna Wintourish editor). His film always looks swooningly lovely: especially the scene in which George shares a cigarette with a beautiful Spanish boy, swathed in the smoggy redness of an LA dusk. But that black-and-white flashback showing George and Jim sunbathing nude on some rugged and frankly uncomfy-looking rocks – that is just outrageously ad-like. Bafflingly, concerned people are always telling George that he "looks terrible" or "looks awful". No he doesn't: I'm tempted to say that genuinely terrible-looking people are not permitted past the velvet rope in this movie. With his superb suits and elegant specs, George looks the way the rest of the film looks: absolutely just so.

Well, this movie, so ­accomplished visually, is still a good frame for Firth's performance: a man who has had to construct or reconstruct a personality to bear the weight of loss, and whom ­society will not permit to grieve. ­Delicately, and rather brilliantly, Firth suggests how his quiet heroism is ­mingled with notes of irony and self-deprecation. It is a poignant, deeply compassionate portrait.

...Waking up begins with saying am and now. For the past eight months waking up has actually hurt. The cold realization that I am still here slowly sets in.... It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play.

Soundtrack:

Baudelaire
(1962)
Written and Performed by Serge Gainsbourg
Courtesy of Mercury France
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

Cyber Cafe
Written and performed by Norman Harris
Courtesy of Manhattan Production Music

Everyone Can See
Written by Ken Morrison and Mark Reiman
Performed by Gail Pettis
Courtesy of Crucial Music Corporation

Ebben? Ne andro lontana' from 'La Wally'
Written by Alfredo Catalani
Performed by Miriam Gauci
Courtesy of Naxos by arrangement with Source/Q

Stormy Weather
(1933)
Written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler
Performed by Etta James
Courtesy of Geffen Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises

Green Onions
(1962)
Written by Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones and Lewie Steinberg (as Lewis Steinberg)
Performed by Booker T. & the M.G.s
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp
By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

Blue Moon
(1934)
Written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
Performed by Jo Stafford
courtesy of JSP Records

Moon Over Manhattan
Composed by Robert Etoll
Courtesy of Megatrax Music

Scène d'Amour
(uncredited)
Written by Bernard Herrmann
[from Vertigo (1958)]

George's Waltz 1
(uncredited)
Written and Performed by Shigeru Umebayashi

A Variation on Scotty Tails Madeline
(uncredited)
Written and Performed by Shigeru Umebayashi

Carlos
(uncredited)
Written and Performed by Shigeru Umebayashi

George's Waltz 2
(uncredited)
Written and Performed by Shigeru Umebayashi