It's all about the eyes. So many of the scenes from Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009) centers on the organs of sight. In one of the early scenes, George Falconer (Colin Firth) lays down in the snow next to his dead lover Jim (Matthew Goodeand) and looks into his pale glazed over eyes. In a flashback scene of his first encounter with Jim, emphasis is placed on eye contact and non-verbal communication. Consequent scenes include a sensual visual exchange with his student Kenny Potter (Nicholas Hoult), who wears a soft, white mohair jumper, and another with Carlos (Jon Kortajarena) a Spanish male prostitute who lights his cigarette and looks vaguely like James Dean. Ford doesn't only use eye to eye contact between George and other males he encounters, there is also a close-up scene of the eyes and lips of one of his female students, who for all purposes resembles the iconic 60s film-star and sex-goddess, Brigit Bardot. George parks his car in front of a large billboard of the frightened eyes of Janet Leigh (Marion Crane) from the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) and in another scene he encounters the beautiful eyes of his neighbours daughter. Of course, there is that very telling scene, which tells of things reflected back to us, very early on, in which he looks at himself in the mirror whilst dressing and tells himself to 'just get through the day'.
The emphasis on eyes in this film is not only that they convey so much feeling, that they insist that we see the world through the eyes of George who has lost his lover in a car accident and is experiencing loss and grief, but that in our looking at all this beauty (the film is exquisitely beautiful and why wouldn't it be, it was directed by Tom Ford, a former designer for the Gucci fashion house) we are asked to see beyond the pain and sorrow of George's planned suicide, beyond the chaos that is happening in the world in 1962, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fact that at that time gay people remained invisible for fear that they would be stigmatised and loose their jobs, to the beauty that surrounds him. And there are so many beautiful scenes, which reference a time that was going through so many political, social and economic upheavals.
What is amazing about this film that amidst all this beauty and order - George is depicted as being an obsessive compulsive, all his clothing, utensils and other possessions are neatly placed in correct order and he has even laid out clothing that he wants to be buried in (including instructions that his tie must be made with a Windsor knot), along with his will, insurance papers and keys on his table; George is experiencing so much inner turmoil. Indeed, the many scenes of him floating in water suggest that he is literally drowning in sorrow.
Ford's ability to create designer fashion has worked well for him here, for he has crafted a film that uses the very fact that we love to look, to insist that we look deeper into this film, to try and understand that love has more to do with sensuality rather than just sexuality (there is no depiction of any obvious sexual act in the film) and that no matter how much we think we are in control that this is just as much as an illusion as the masks created by fashion, clothing and human behavior.
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