Tom Ford Fail

When a friend tells you to see a certain movie in order to better understand him, what can you do but get yourself to the theater? In the case of Tom Ford's 'A Single Man', I'm not sure any psychological similarity between oneself and the film's characters should be advertised; at best, it seems melodramatic, at worst more than a little self-aggrandizing.

This film was supposed to be the start of the former Gucci designer's grand new life as a man of the cinema. F. Scott Fitzgerald's rueful observation comes to mind ("There are no second acts in American lives") which, though mostly untrue, for Mr Ford might deservedly turn out to be the case.

James, or Colin Firth in the title role, is a depressive but rather stylish professor of English at a little college in Los Angeles, back when Southern California was livable. In the course of a day, he thinks sadly of his partner of sixteen years, who recently died in an accident; goes to school, where a young man with a face like a porcelain doll makes eyes at him in class; comes home, thinks about blowing his brains out but decides against; instead has dinner and drinks, but mostly drinks, with his best friend, Charlie (Julianne Moore), who tries to seduce him; then heads out to a bar, where he picks up said porcelain-faced boy before dying of a heart attack, putting to rest any danger of what would have been a supremely uncomfortable love scene. It's an abrupt ending which left me wishing that, had he been a little more decisive with the pistol, he would have saved Charlie the bother of trying to sleep with him.

In fact, the entire film is constructed around the apparently unbearable sex appeal of middle-aged men in natty suits. In the course of the movie, poor James must fend off not only of Charlie, who one might have counted on to understand that after sixteen years her friend's pederasty was not a passing phase, and the doll-boy, tirelessly enthused for his professor, but a very angular, rather handsome Spanish prostitute who makes a pass at him in the parking lot. "Aren't we going somewhere?" he asks James. "No," James says. There's something off-putting about the stream of younger men flinging themselves at him mere hours before he bites the dust, as if even in the last hours of life there's nothing better to do than think about sex.

More broadly, the film is infused with a sensibility which is emphatically that of a fashion designer, not a director. I don't mean the costumes; they're nice, but nothing you couldn't find in Brooks Brothers. Instead, the film is animated with the melodramatic aesthetic of a fashion show: a woman smiles, and her lips turn brilliant red. A handsome young man enters the room and the screen brightens as if a floodlight had been switched on. Out of the blue, the quality of the image turns grainy and switches to slow-motion; abrupt shifts such as these might not look out of place in an advertisement, but in a movie they seem amateurish. It's as if Ford is trying to bring the senseless, got-your-attention spontaneity of fashion to film but it ends by feeling like a film-school experiment.

I shouldn't pretend the movie's terrible, but neither is it all that. In ten years, it will be looked back on as an oddity - "Remember that time Tom Ford made a movie?" - watched by those curious about its director's career in fashion - if in ten years anyone remembers Tom Ford at all.