I know it’s been a short while since A Single Man came out, and Colin Firth didn’t win the Oscar and all – though he did win a Bafta, give a brilliant speech, and look super-fly while he was at it.  But I’ve been thinking about this film ever since I saw it, and I’m only just working out why Tom Ford’s directorial début, though fantastic in many ways, didn’t quite do it for me.

By ‘do it for me’, I don’t only mean ‘make me cry,’ although in my lexicon the two are often synonymous.  I really mean that the ingredients of this film – an absorbing story, excellent performances from respected actors, gorgeous scenery and perfectly put-together shots – promised more of an effect upon the audience than they delivered.

I have read with interest the various reviews of A Single Man, and to generalise only a little, they have chiefly said that the film looks too much like an extended version of the advertisements which were Tom Ford’s cinematic training-ground.  This is somewhat true: there is no question that Ford’s stylised visual effects ratchet up the allure of what’s on screen very much in the style of an advert.

But I don’t, as some do, think that this accentuated aestheticism spoils the film because it is distracting; still less do I take the view of the Guardian’s David Cox, whose blog on what he called this ‘profoundly gay’ film was fairly plausible, until he tried to found his argument on the thesis that homosexual people ‘have a heightened appreciation of the look of things.’

It is my opinion that the extraordinary artistic aptness of A Single Man – everything and everyone on screen is lined up, lit up, polished up, from start to finish – means that the tragic plotline has its sadness neutralised.  The repression of the central character, George Falconer, who focuses obsessively on maintaining the appearance of normality after his partner’s untimely death, is reflected a little too well in the film’s insistence on rendering emotional chaos sensorily appealing.  There can be no catharsis at the end of A Single Man, because mini-catharses are happening all the time.

In this, the workings of the film remind me of a scene from Shakespeare’s Richard II. Deposed, slung in jail, and being hectored by his enemy, Richard has his misery soothed by a metaphor.  When the fallen king breaks a mirror and Bolingbroke tells him, ‘The shadow of thy sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of thy face’, Richard answers, ‘Say that again. /  “The shadow of my sorrow?”  Ha, let’s see.’  He is so busy being delighted by the appositeness of what Bolingbroke has said that he forgets to be sad.

Just so, Tom Ford is the Bolingbroke to his audience’s Richard II; but we, unlike that unlucky monarch, and unlike the bereaved George, do not need our grief neutralising.  Ours is not real grief: if it’s diluted by much more than the fact of its fictiveness, we cease to feel it altogether.

There is a measure of excellence in Tom Ford’s decision to replicate at the level of the film itself the behaviour of its central character – but such bravura mimesis comes at the cost of the audience’s true emotional engagement.  We can only feel the shadow of our sorrow, and A Single Man, though it is an impressive and occasionally affecting film, is ultimately the poorer for it.

posted by Roberta