A Single Man

If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it's not a world that I want to live in.

George (Colin Firth) is a gay English professor living in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. He wakes from a dream of drowning, and of walking across a serene and icy landscape to lie next to the blood-covered body of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode). As he reluctantly greets the day, George describes, in a crisp and achingly sad voiceover, the malaise that he has fallen into following Jim's death eight months ago in a car crash. The world has lost its lustre and its meaning for him, and he has resolved to stop the pain of an uncertain future by embracing the certainty of oblivion. He just needs to get through one more day, then no more will follow.

A Single Man, the debut feature from Tom Ford, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Christopher Isherwood, is a film about loss, memory and the past. It is a film which seeks to recreate, as accurately as possible, the mindset of a man who is so despondent about the death of his lover that he has resolved to take his own life, but which ultimately celebrates the sheer beauty and joy of being alive, and does so with a breathtakingly gorgeous visual style.

Tom Ford, whose background is as a fashion designer, clearly has a photographer's eye, judging by the exquisite framing and composition on display. His use of colour, in particular, is often stunning. For the most part, the film has a desaturated and sombre palette that has the effect of making the film look like a product of the '60s, rather than just a recreation of it, but also acts as the perfect illustration of George's own slanted worldview. The world around him is grey, dull and numbed because it is a world without Jim. Some objects, people and events, though, are able to break through his cocoon of self-absorption: The family across the road, a rose, the lips of a young Spanish man, each of these awaken something in George that reminds him of what is good in the world, and the screen suddenly fills with vibrant, gorgeous colour. It's a simple but hugely expressive technique that beautifully conveys what George's existence is like on a day-to-day basis.

But beneath the visual flair of the film - which is simply remarkable considering it's a first film - is a powerful dramatic core that gives the images a resonance beyond their cosmetic beauty. It's very much a film about grief. Not the sharp and searing pain of a recent bereavement, but the numbing pain of living with the memories and the loss everyday. Everywhere he looks, George is confronted by images, people and places that remind him of Jim. The weight of the past is so hard to bear that it makes the present unendurable, and the future unimaginable. Faced with this, suicide seems the only sensible option to George.

Key to the success of the film is Colin Firth's portrayal of George. As someone who has always liked Firth, but never really thought much of him as an actor, I was shocked by the quality of his performance. It's a masterclass in subtle restraint, in which the slightest look or sigh conveys a depth of feeling that is startling. He doesn't let much faze him. He breezes through life with a cool detachment, and there is a classically English austerity and properness to the way that he goes about his day, carefully preparing every last detail so that when he shoots himself, it will cause the bare minimum fuss and bother. Yet Firth makes it apparent that George is viewing the world behind a protective pane of glass. Any disturbance to his plan, however slight, clearly ruffles George, however much he tries to hide it. His immaculate suit and glasses are his armour against the world, but behind them there is a palpable sense of sadness and loss, of a man whose world has fallen apart and who has finally decided to stop trying to put it back together.

But during those all too brief moments when the colour comes back into his life, when he dances with his best friend (Julianne Moore) or enjoys the attention of a flirtatious student (Nicholas Hoult), Firth and Ford make us believe that George can come back from this and find happiness again. Despite the obvious darkness of its subject, Ford's film has a light and beauty to it that makes us believe that George will be able to make it beyond this day, even though we know in our hearts, as he knows in his, that the pain of living may prove too much for him.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Is very good indeed.


In Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, a biopic of the singer Ian Dury, director Mat Whitecross and writer Paul Viragh use a vaudevillian stage motif in which Dury, played by Andy Serkis, performs in front of a live audience. It's a bold and exciting conceit that allows them to mix storming performances with anecdotes as Dury tells the story of his life, us of his time in a children's hospital after a bout with polio that left him crippled, his relationship with his father (Ray Winstone), and son Baxter (Bill Milner). These performances then lead into the more classically cinematic - but no less enjoyable - sequences depicting events from Dury's eventful life. Taken together, these disparate pieces create a chaotic and exciting portrait of a complicated and contradictory individual.

I couldn't help but think that a more traditional - and lesser - film would have chosen to use Dury's childhood battle with polio, which left him crippled for the rest of his life, as a life-affirming example of someone overcoming their personal demons, in the style of painfully worthy biopics like Ray. Whitecross, Serkis and Viragh do something much more interesting: They take the view that Dury's polio was not something he overcame but something he channeled. His anger at the treatment he received as a child, being told at one point by a dictatorial orderly (Toby Jones) to accept his crippled nature and give up trying to be "normal", drove him to try to prove the world wrong at any cost.

Serkis delivers one of the finest performances of his career, giving Dury all the fire, swagger and snarl that he had in life. Whether singing live on stage - Serkis performs all his own vocals and the likeness to Dury's voice is eerie - or acting alongside his co-stars, he completely inhabits the skin of Dury, a dedication which extended to allowing one of his legs to atrophy in order to better mimic Dury's gait. He shows off Dury's humour and undeniable magnetism, both on - and off-stage, but also the darker, self-destructive side of his persona, the side that made him quite an isolated figure at the height of the Blockheads' success. Serkis shows us that the very same desire to live life to the fullest was the same thing that led him to hurt those around him.

It's very much a film about relationships between fathers and sons, with the relationship between Ian and his father Bill, and the one between Ian and his son Baxter forming the backbone of the story. We see how Ian's love for his father, despite it being his father who placed him in the hospital that Ian so despised, was key to Ian's personality; it was his father's tough love and belief that everyone has to stand on their own that helped make Ian such a tough, uncompromising character.

Elsewhere, we are shown the effects that Ian's success has on his young son, Baxter. Though they are initially very distant, with Baxter living with Ian's ex-wife, the success of The Blockheads brings them together as Baxter learns to respect and admire his father, whilst also being privy to the darker side of his father's success, an exposure that very nearly kills him. As Baxter, Bill Milner continues to mark himself out as one of the best young British actors out there at the moment. He absolutely nails the mix of love, awe and anger that Baxter feels for his father. If he can stay this good as he grows up then he could very well be the next Christian Bale.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is an absolutely wonderful film. It's a worthy celebration of a uniquely British figure whose love for life oozes out of the screen. It's joyous and uplifting but not mawkish or sentimental. It's a reason to be cheerful.