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 In cinemas Thursday [M]
Director: Tom Ford
Runtime: 101 mins
Should A Single Man’s protagonist George Falconer (Colin Firth), a university professor living in 1962 California, be described as a gay university professor living in 1962 California, it would defeat much of the point of the film. It is the same point shared by the greatest of those films that tell the stories of minorities: that such a focus is at once central and tangential, that the story is both as unique as its human protagonist and as universal as humanity, transcending any false boundary; that just as this film’s title refers to a man not married to a woman, it is also refers to a single man because he lacks his other half.
George, eight months after the death of his lover of 16 years Jim (Matthew Goode), is struggling to uphold his emotional mask for – as the revolver he tucks into his briefcase forewarns – one final day. But the film is not so much about mourning death as it’s about lamenting existential isolation, as one of George’s students reveals in the precocious insight that we are forever trapped within our own bodies and sole experience. Connection, George says, is the only thing that has given his life meaning; love is perhaps nothing more than a brief respite, and George’s life without Jim seems a recurring realisation of this. Where the tangential becomes central is in George’s unnoticed grief – his hidden connection with Jim is necessarily a hidden loss, and this lack of acknowledgement sharpens George’s torment into some cruel existential prank. Even his closest friend Charley (Julianne Moore) speculates that Jim was only a “substitute for a real relationship”.
The film reveals George’s relationship to Jim in generous flashback, triggered by the mundane, from a ringing phone to the act of waking up. As words on the screenplay these scenes would read as cliché, but in his directorial debut, fashion designer-cum-filmmaker Tom Ford makes Jim pervade the film like a hanging spectre, clawing for George’s attentive sorrow.
The film is based on the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name (which I have not read) and begins much like the pages of some sprawling work of great American literature, but as characters enter for and exit for single scenes, ideas introduced and left only to linger, the film becomes a reduction to the simple feeling of the human desire for meaning and genuine connection. In this way the film becomes a poignant kind of one-act play.
As a cinematic debut, the film is at times clumsy with an air of film school naïveté, but where Ford succeeds – his capturing of the feeling of a standing-still emotional reeling – he succeeds in measures rarely seen from a first-time filmmaker.
****
PAUL RANKIN
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