A Single Man

George Falconer awakensagain from a nightmare in which the body of his longtime lover, Jim, appears onthe roadside after the car wreck that killed him a few months earlier. Falconerwas always the dour Englishman, an expatriate literature professor in Los Angeles, but Jim’sdeath pushed him into a deeper funk. Waking is a cold reminder that time isrunning out. For him, the awful ticking of the clock that is A Single Man’s audio motif has more thanabstract significance. Later that day, after the meticulous preparationcharacteristic of his orderly life, Falconer plans to kill himself.

Set in fall of 1962against a drumbeat of ominous news during the Cuban Missile Crisis, A Single Man is the story of an ebbinglife adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel by fashion designer Tom Ford inhis directorial debut. Colin Firth is able as Falconer, a carefully andcomfortably closeted gay man in a society with little tolerance for aberranceof any sort. A cagey social critic in a nation barely recovered from thehangover of McCarthyism, he complains to a colleague that the college’s bovinestudents aspire to nothing but corporate jobs and raising doltish children, whowill amuse themselves by singing soda-pop jingles learned from television. “Aworld with no time for sentiment is not a world I want to live in,” Falconersays with a note of finality.

Ford visualizes Falconer’s thoughts as he slipsin and out of past and present with a profusion of images, sometimesilluminating and sometimes not. The director is enamored of arty tics,including grotesque close-ups, which serve no purpose. And yet the mood of hishighly stylized treatment of Isherwood’s story, set to a high-strungneo-romantic score, lingers in memory on the strength of the twilight emotionsit suggests. A Single Man also starsJulianne Moore as the woman Falconer continues to love, another Englishexpatriate whose dreams have slipped away.