Venice Wraps With Tom Ford’s Extraordinary “Man”

A scene from Tom Ford's "A Single Man." Image courtesy of the Venice Film Festival.

Things I expected from Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel “A Single Man”: Some lovely suits. (I don’t think this was unreasonable.) Ravishing cinematography. Fastidious production design. An intense, perhaps even synesthetic affinity with the sensual world. Some well-toned ass.

All were duly accounted for.

Things I did not expect: An innate sense of composition and editing. The attentive direction of actors. (Colin Firth, in particular, delivers probably his finest performance here.) A deep feeling for cinema. With just one feature to his credit, Mr Ford has proved himself an infinitely more fluent and natural filmmaker than, say, Stephen Daldry.

Nor did I anticipate the film’s powerful emotional punch. No mere play of elegant surfaces, this is a love story - and an extraordinarily moving one. But it’s also a study of a man searching in vain for reasons to live, almost as powerful, in its way, as Louis Malle’s great “Le Fou Follet”.

To say this came as a surprise is something of an understatement, since I have to say, I’ve always found Tom Ford faintly ludicrous. Perhaps it was his public image: those crisp white shirts typically open to the sternum, revealing a carefully depilated expanse of tanned flesh; his moodily lowered chin and smouldering gaze. Or those Vanity Fair shots of him draped over and across various naked young women, in whom he clearly has about as much interest as Karen Carpenter at a pastrymaker’s convention. He’s a talented designer, no question of that (I cherish my pair of narrow-cut black Gucci trousers), but when he announced he was quitting PPR to commence a career as a filmmaker ... well, let’s just say my hopes were not exactly high.

In this, however, I was proved wrong. Very much so.

Set in Los Angeles during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film is shot mostly with a desaturated palette, which surges into deeper colours whenever the protagonist’s attention is caught by a man (or woman) he finds attractive. The result bears the influence, not only of Douglas Sirk, but of Hitchcock - notably in a momentary flirtation between Firth’s George and a handsome young Spaniard, which takes place in front of a giant poster for “Psycho”. (And which then fades, from deep blue to something washed-out, almost invisible, as the very air around them seems to shift, into livid reds and pinks and mauves. Occasioned by the sunset, yes, and “the Los Angeles smog”, as the young hustler notes ... but also something more subjective, more urgent.)

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Yet interestingly, the film is less “a gay movie” - early reports placed it somewhere between “Un Chant d’Amour” and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” - than a study of romantic yearning and erotic fascination, in which many of the main characters happen to be homosexual. (Ford declared, at the press conference, his intention to make a universal story, albeit filtered through the perspective of a gay man.) And if it is “a gay movie”, then it is one with barely a trace of Camp: the tone here is by turns contemplative, impassioned, elegiac ... but not for a moment does to descend to common kitsch. Nor is it ashamed, or furtive. On the contrary: this is a love that most definitely dares to speak its name. This is not special pleading - I’m certainly not suggesting this is a gay flick it’s “okay” for straights to like (and I suspect anyway that many won’t). But I do think it might represent a distinct step forward for American queer cinema, since in normalising the characters’ desire, and integrating them more or less seamlessly - and largely on their own terms - into a fully-realised fictional world, it abandons many of the tendencies that have stymied and continue to dog gay-themed movies: the descent into caricature; the tongue-tied hedging of the issue or - its obverse - the need for weary, Bruce LaBruce-like shock-tactics. Such strategies might have been necessary back in the dark days of 1970s, or even the 80s - but now? it’s 2009, folks. They’re here; they’re queer ... we’re used to it. -This article continues on page 2- Page 1 of 2 Next Login to recommend this article » posted on September 12, 2009 Films to Snag Login to Leave a Comment »