RHUM

Tom Ford: the king of fashion, the man who picked Gucci out of the garbage bin and placed it on top of the world (only for it to fall from grace as soon as he left). The thought that such a stylish, sophisticated man could direct a film excited me, to say the least. After seeing the trailer for A Single Man, I was salivating; I couldn’t wait for the moment I would sit in the darkness of the cinema to savour two hours of beauty.

And beauty is what I got – if only that were the one thing that came with the package. For Tom Ford’s debut venture A Single Man is nothing but that – a pretty film without substance, badly handled, poorly scripted, and with too many annoyingly good-looking people that should be peppering the catwalks of Milan instead.

When I first saw this film back in September 2009, there had been little publicity out there, and at the time I thought there could be nothing that could save this film from the clenches of reviewers all over the world. Instead, A Single Man has been lauded as a work of art. Had this not been Mr Ford’s work, I am sure the critics would think otherwise.

As for Colin Firth, his award-winning acting seems more wooden than emotional, but here again a script that persists on the same point for the best part of two hours allows little space for manoeuvring. The most annoying of all things is the so-called British accent sported by Julianne Moore. Where American Vogue thinks it delicious, we at RHUM see it more as, ‘Bloody hell, woman, take that potato out o’ ye mouth and talk like a proper Brit.’

The film feels like a commercial that drags for two hours, with the director worrying too much about the aesthetic of a feeling at the expense of the emotions themselves, allowing the audience little opportunity to enter the emotional realm of the characters. The only moment in which that happens is a scene in which Firth and Moore get drunk and reminisce about the past. Though the sequence is merely some five minutes in length, it feels real and touching. It is a pity that soon after, the enchantment is again broken for more visual exploitation of empty beauty.

2/5 stars.