Babel

Fashion designer Tom Ford said the following of his directorial debut : A Single Man "is not a gay film."

And he's right. Just as René Magritte's La trahison des images depicts not a pipe, but an image of a pipe, so does Ford's A Single Man depict sexuality—as an image not of homosexuality, but of sexually proper, a metaphysical love of body—in the most cleverly silent manner, free of the crass verbose silence that makes Brokeback Mountain, Alexander and Milk exploitatively vulgar.

A Single Man tells the story of single men. We have George (perfectly played by Colin Firth) who is single in the sense of being broodingly solitary after losing his lover of sixteen years to a car accident; and single too in the sense of being mateless. And then we have his dead lover Jim, the other single man, George's single man, the only man, perhaps the only human, George ever loved.

The film begins eight months after Jim's death and spans a day in George's new empty life of routine longing. Everywhere George longs. In his bedroom, where he awakens from a nightmare, bedsheets ink-stained from a fountain pen, he longs. As he dresses himself in his meticulous slim cut brown suit complemented by a narrow tie and handsome tiebar, he longs. In the bathroom, where, from on the toilet, he watches his neighbors' children violently play as violent baby boomers do, he longs. In the university, where he teaches and grows frustrated with the intellectually shallow hippies and Cold War condition, he longs. And in his den, where he loads his revolver's ammo and artfully stages (as practice) his shallow suicide, he longs for a return to his love, for the escape he aesthetically dreads.

The revolver is introduced early on and is the object of suspense throughout the film. And with it burnt into our memory as the polished black symbol for the future, it seems as if the characters we meet throughout George's day are but interruptions to a seemingly inevitable end. But they're not interruptions; rather they're interventions. His flirty student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, perhaps the worst performance in the film), the handsome Spanish drifter Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), and his former (and only) heterosexual flame Charley (Juliane Moore) seem to serve as lessons for the teacher teaching Huxley, lessons of absurdity, reminders of a certain Camusian ideal that suicide is but the rejection of freedom and therefore a sort of psychological enslavement.

The film is not a gay film nor does it fall victim to the tired (and melodramatic) gay liberation diatribe; its about a man's escape from enslaving dreams of suicide. Sure George is not invited to his lover's funeral for obvious reasons, and sure he must remain closeted, but that's not the topic of this film. Unlike many modern sexual discourses which, as Michel Foucault says, are "dedicated...to speaking of [sex] ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret," Tom Ford's film is smarter. A Single Man does not exploit sexuality as the secret or even a secret, it shows homosexuality as sexuality; homosexual loss as common loss; and homosexual love as love. He captures beautifully for the heterosexual viewer/critic something relatable, something finally not so purposefully exploitative, not so cheap: the accessible seductions of the human body, of the mouth, the lips, the eyes, of the smile and the gaze.

Tom Ford's first film does not preach in a muted voice, nor does it preach in loud one. In fact, it doesn't even preach—it speaks. It speaks in the language of Greek tragedy, with a grandiose style, an art form and polished finesse grand enough to (in the words of Morrissey) "make Caligula blush."

But aside from the almost fascist-like Riefenstahlian imagery (however beautiful), the terribly plastic, if not off-putting Hoult and a few unneeded, over-done scenes (the reoccurring water dream), bravo to the original author Christopher Isherwood and bravo to director Tom Ford.

A Single Man is an excellent film—a film that tries neither to further stigmatize or normalize the most talked about sexual obsession of our time; a film that just lets it breathe comfortably in a thoughtful and well-set drama-tragedy. 3.5/4