A Single Man

Cinema releases are a bittersweet delight when you're marooned in suburbia.  Although utterly immersive when sitting in the cinema, the experience is a holiday from reality, which must inevitably lead with a return home through the double doors at the back into an identikit multiplex lobby leading out onto a street ornamented with the salmon-pink stone of the newly built supermarket.


Although A Single Man (and along with it, most releases screened in Venice, Cannes or Munich) isn't showing at our local identikit multiplex - a place where Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 was afforded a three month run due to high demand.  And so I hiked up to the identikit multiplex in the Docklands.  A place where ol' Alvin never even got a week, but Up In The Air has been on for two months now.

Strangely, the cinema experience was the same - the same wave of uninspiration walking out on the same brand-issue carpet, despite the architecture, the historic wharf-front, the proximity to places of interest and possibility.  Maybe I'm carrying my 'life of the mind' around me in my bubble... Jeanette, you and Atlas'd be proud; I'm examining the boundaries of my own existence...

Whether it's drawing people in to us to resist orbit or merely to help examine the edges of our bubble, the idea to 'only connect' has got to be key - certainly Tom Ford thinks so.  From Isherwood's novel with its undercurrent of rage against the author's lover left, Ford can see from a clearer vantage point, and uses the film to explore far more deeply the love between  George and Jim, making the idea of new connections compounded with more feeling than in the original book. Floating weightless and in danger of drowning we see the symbol of so many of our daily lives, and this blissful self-annihilation we see in the film in drugs, drunkenness - even interior design - all temporary salves to quell a darker force.

And yet, when connections are made between human beings, real connection, the design fades away from our consciousness - when George is connecting with another, we don't notice the beautiful architecture, the walls, the elegant cut of the clothes.  How did Ford do that?  Or is us?

I'm saying us, but maybe that should be 'is it me?'  I guess the message to connect has bested the curse of the exit into the double doors and indentikit carpet and the inevitable retreat into the bubble.

A masterpiece in every respect.  I'm off to do a little connecting right now...