A Perfect World
There are few things more galling in life than seeing a person, already immoderately successful in their chosen field, try something new and make a success of it. This has become a depressingly common experience in the movies. First it was the phenomenon of the artist-turned-director, with Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood. Now it is the unlikely spectacle of the fashion-designer-turned-director in the shape of Tom Ford, former Gucci supremo, directing A Single Man. This period adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel has received glowing reviews and promises to garner a deserved Oscar for its lead, Colin Firth.
It really shouldn't come as a surprise that a fashion designer should become a director. Both roles demand the ability to command an extended team and to make an endless series of minute creative decisions whilst maintaining a clear artistic vision. Any sense of incongruity between these two professions is probably the result of the Hemingway-like posturings of other directors, unable to admit that the job has as much to do with leafing through fabric swatches for costumes, gossiping with the makeup department and throwing hissy fits as it does with shouting “Action!” through a large megaphone. In a recent New Yorker profile James Cameron proudly showed how he would often grab a brush from the makeup artist's hand just before the camera rolled, saying “I always do makeup touch-ups myself”, thereby staking his claim to do every job on a film set better than anyone else. But he finished this sentence with the words: “especially for blood, wounds, and dirt”. Phew. For a moment we thought that the ever macho Cameron might have a thing for lipstick and concealer.
After seeing the suspiciously pink lips of the immaculately groomed Nicholas Hoult in A Single Man, I think we can safely conclude that Tom Ford has no such issues with lipstick. Whilst it was unlikely that Ford would make a movie about an overweight, polyester wearing, ugly family living in suburban Alabama, the sheer gorgeousness of the clothes, the period details, and the actors in A Single Man is breathtaking. In a scene played out in a parking lot against a glowing, toxic L.A. sunset, Colin Firth's character, George, meets Carlos, a Spanish gigolo who has styled himself on James Dean, though, as George tells him, he looks better than Dean. Even someone as leadenly heterosexual as me can see he's right. Carlos, all cheekbones, white T-shirt and jeans, is otherworldly in his beauty.
There is no shame in glittering surfaces and glamour in the movies. But in its portrait of the neurotically perfectionist George and in the obsessively styled world it creates, A Single Man hints at the exhausting lives that Tom Ford and his fellow inhabitants of the glossy pages lead, where absolutely everything – and I mean everything, even the neighbours – must be perfect. It all looks so tiring. At times, this compulsive search for surface perfection undermines the film. When the depressed George encounters someone or something that reminds him of his life before bereavement the colour of the image becomes visibly richer and more ravishing. Whilst this looks lovely, as a technique to reveal character psychology it is only slightly more subtle than using a yellow highlighter pen. And Ford continues fashion's disastrous relationship with humour; his stabs at comedy in the film fall as flat as those 'witty' clothing designs that mean you're wearing someone else's joke. These drawbacks aside, A Single Man is an absorbing and sumptuous watch given a heart by Firth's moving and understated performance.
The worn knitwear and heavy tweeds of the islanders in Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (being shown at the CCA in Glasgow on Thursday 11 February) might also be considered a fashion statement, part of a rustic revival. The film was made in 1937 on the remote Shetland island of Foula, its story a deliberate echo of the evacuation of St Kilda which had occurred only seven years before. Whilst this earnest movie lacks the sparkle and bite of Powell's later work, it captures the spirit of a place and a people that seem all the more strange and exotic for being so close to us in space and time.