George, a British English literature professor, living in 1962 Los Angeles, has decided that today will be the last day in of his life. Meticulous and exacting , his daily routine hardly differs from its predecessors, except for the heightening of his senses in a myriad of sundry, mundane and poignant chance encounters.
Pessimistic by nature and obsessed with the finality and certainty of death, George has been barely going through the motions, living as he does, in the shadow cast by a tragic car accident.
Bereaving a loving 16 year relationship, George is not allowed to attend his partner’s funeral. Stuck and isolated in an unacknowledged past, he is unable to see his future. Colin Firth, in a Bafta award winning performance, plays his college professor straight and succeeds in portraying his character’s predicament as universal. He gives another impeccably restrained performance, hinting at (but never exploiting) the inner torture, sadness and lost hope that continually simmers at the surface. Does Firth ever need to act? He emanates enough performance by just being Firth.
Equally mesmerizing, is Julianne Moore’s perfectly counterbalanced , cinematically imprinting, fag-hag turn as Charley, a divorced, shored up, glamour housewife, who finds herself aimless, bereft of the role she has perfected, and who still has a ‘thing’ for ex-lover and best friend George.
“Experience is not what happens to you, but what a man does with what happens to you”, George, quoting Aldus Huxley, tells a besotted/admiring student who has been trailing him all day. And as a result of the decision he has taken, George’s total immersion in the eternal present, enables him to reach out and reconnect with life in its arbitrary moments of meaning. Gifts of brief glimpses of bliss and understanding, unconscious of space and time, that make it worth living.
Based on Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel, and co-scripted by first time director, Tom Ford, ‘A Single Man’ is elegant, stylish and well accessorized by good looking supporting actors who do credit to their craft and the exquisitely, vintage costumes and sets. Well, you wouldn’t expect anything less from the designer behind Gucci’s and YSL’s turn around.
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel, rather than think and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh it is as though it had all come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them but like everything else they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present and I realize that everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be.”
Review written by Warren J. Bugeja
Comments