Single to Mingle

Title: A single man

Directed by: Tom Ford

Written by: Christopher Isherwood and Tom Ford

Cast: Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult

The 1960’s were great. There were no black people, fat people, hardly any women, everyone bought their clothes straight out of Vogue and Bazaar Catalogues, College professors lived in some of the most stunning homes ever created, all the boys were so cute! And most importantly everything was absolutely stunning! Okay maybe the 1960’s weren’t like that, but Tom Ford likes to think they were.

In his aesthetically perfect Cinema Debut the King of the Runway takes on the camera and creates what can only be described as the most ambitious Gucci Advert to date. This film is stunning, Ford manages to create the most phenomenal mis-en-scene throughout the film from the naked Colin Firth in the harrowing blues of a swimming pool water to Firth’s perfect house, and I mean perfect down to the crisp white shirts he wears every morning which I can swear were bought on Rodeo drive every morning before shooting started.

There’s not much to the film, it’s about loneliness more than anything else and the terror “” experiences in the aftermath of the death of his lover, the narrative follows “” through the grieving process and all the idiosyncratic and minimalistic aspects of his existence. I’d love to say more but not much more than that happens, its simply just one hell of an amazing runway show with a simple story. Ford’s a design genius and we see this in most of the frames of the film, especially in the way he frames “” in his loneliness. But outside of that its pretty much just eye-candy, there a lot of half naked men, poster-boys for the 40 year old gay man’s fantasy who don’t really say much as much as waffle in their own beauty like Ford does in this film.

More than anything it’s extremely self indulgent. Ford does everything in his power to show us just how good a director her really is, most notably in the flashbacks in the film where he sets one in the most jagged masculine location on earth, where Firth and ‘’” discuss their homosexuality.

All in all it’s not terrible, as it is aesthetically stunning, but without cause or explanation and at times it felt as though the film was just dubbed and the dialogue was added to make it a film.

But then again we’re all self-indulgent and we all want the world to know how good we are, Ford knows this and so do I.

I give it 4 Hoers