Devastating grief

A Single Man
Nationwide, 12A

A Single Man is noted fashion designer Tom Ford’s debut feature film and while it is distractingly over-designed — every table lamp looks as if it had its own personal stylist — it is also a true and proper account of bereavement, grief, loss and loneliness. I can see I haven’t made it sound like a fun-packed, feel-good night at the cinema, and it isn’t, but its depth of feeling is so powerful and commanding it’s almost bruising. Heavens, I’ve made it sound even less fun now. You know, this is a hard film to recommend, because it’s so sad, and a hard film to not recommend, because it’s so good about what it is like to be so sad. A tricky one or, to put it another way: unlike It’s Complicated, this rather is.

Ford financed this film, produced it, directed it and adapted the screenplay from the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name but did not write the ‘theme toon’, as far as I am aware. Set in California in 1962, our single man is George Falconer (Colin Firth), a middle-aged, gay, British professor of English at an American university who has been struggling to find any meaning in his life since his long-term lover, Jim, died in a car crash eight months previously. George dresses in beautiful suits, lives in a beautiful, modernist glass and wood house with those beautifully styled lamps and drives a beautiful shiny Mercedes with beautiful shiny chrome fenders…but? But he is in such astounding pain that ‘even waking up hurts’. He sees the past in flashbacks and feels he has no future. This is a day in his life; a day that will end, we assume, in George shooting himself.