A Single Man

*SPOILER ALERT*

It is a seriously sexy movie, anal retentively so. Its only flaw is it's simply flawless. Everything is too neat, too clean and too beautiful. Firth plays a middle-aged, hopelessly romantic professor, George who just loses his lover, Jim of sixteen years. The movie chronicles how George lives his supposedly very last day. Though the movie says Jim dies in a car accident while visiting his family but I like to think he just leaves George for another man, probably the self proclaimed cousin who calls George over the phone to deliver the bad news. All the characters in the movie live high up in Maslow's pyramid. A frozen loaf of bread presents the biggest challenge in their everyday living, otherwise their major concerns or preoccupations are of existential in nature, like how to connect with the right person, purpose of their existence. Basically the movie is very bourgeois, very non-proletariat, very Tom Ford, very superfluous. Having said that, I do enjoy the movie, the aesthetic, the nuanced dialogues and voice over and the overall look and feel and also the dignified performance of the cast, especially that of Colin Firth who leads the movie from beginning to end. Of course life has its own little irony--just when George finds his moment of clarity and perhaps a reason or two to soldier on, then "it" just came.