Cinema Nova, 25/2/2010
Status: Behind (This is film #3 for the week and I’m STILL behind!)
I saw a documentary a little while ago that prompted me to start a “Thank Frank I’m not a…” list. Number 1, after that doco was “a closeted gay man grieving the death of my long-term partner in the 1960s”. After a documentary of the ABC the other night number 2 became “an Afgani boy kidnapped into sexual slavery”. After A Single Man, number 3 is “a closeted gay man grieving the death of my long-term partner in the 1960s”.
COLIN FIRTH (Genova) is the griever and MATTHEW GOODE (Watchmen) is the grieved in A Single Man. Firth gives easily his best performance yet (which is saying something, his last bunch of films have been really great). The rest of the support cast, including NICHOLAS HOULT (About a Boy, Wah Wah) and JULIANNE MOORE (Children of Men) bring something that is more than support, but it is entirely Firth’s movie.
I adore the way this film looks. You’d expect a film directed by a fashion designer (TOM FORD, who has a lovely eye and adopts a kind of Sofia-Coppola-Virgin-Suicides-glowy-fuzzy feel) to be stylish, and is certainly is that, but the style here has a lived in quality that you don’t see in, say, Mad Men. Somehow it makes it feel all the more authentic.
There’s slightly too much reliance on the aforementioned glowy-fuzziness and just how really, really, really, really good looking the cast is (I give it a month before it shows up in a first year Cinema Studies lecture about “the body and the male gaze”). But what plot there is is very compelling - Ford’s commentary on homophobia is eloquent without being preachy and Firth’s grief is palpable and moving. I’m just glad I’m not him.
