A Single Man

A Single Man is the third instalment in my “sad gay movies” trilogy, and where the first two are about love, this one is about grief. It’s the directorial debut of designer Tom Ford and frankly has no business being as good as it is. The premise is simple: George is our titular single man. He’s single because he’s middle aged, because hes gay, and because his lover of sixteen years died in a car accident eight months earlier. The film follows the day George decides will be his last. His plan is methodical, polite: go to the bank, sort out the paperwork, teach his class, have one final drink with an old friend, then go home and shoot himself. Everything arranged, nothing left messy. The film is based on Isherwood’s novel, which is far more explicit about longing and love. Ford shifts the angle. His George—played by Colin Firth—is rich, beautiful, immaculate, perfectly tailored in that way only Tom Ford could imagine. You’d think that these surfaces would dull the edges of grief, make it all too put together, too pretty, too fake. But they don’t. They work, because the film traps us so tightly in George’s point of view that we understand the perfection as self-defense. This is how he sees himself: a construction. A man held together by suits and ties; posture and English restraint, disguising a grief so violent it registers as physical pain. He hurts when he wakes. He hurts when he encounters beauty. Everything is pain, immediate and unrelenting. The stylization isn’t a distraction—it’s part of the story. Beauty and wealth do nothing to insulate him. Nothing in the world exists except things to be endured. Firth plays him as almost entirely inaccessible: detached, elegant, faintly sardonic, flawlessly mannered. A man who intends to die with the same tidiness he brought to living. And because he never lets the performance crack, the desperation reads in the negative space: You imagine the animal terror because he won’t show it to you. You infer the urgency because he refuses to voice it. He’s good at this. He’s been doing it for months. That restraint is the film’s emotional engine. Well-groomed mental breakdown, hopelessness poured in tailored suits and shiny shoes.