Wintering in Las Cruces, I saw a re-run of Tom Ford’s wonderful 2011 film, “A Single Man.”  Colin Firth is superb as a middle-aged gay man grieving over the loss of his partner of sixteen years.  The film is about friendship and meaning in life, and it is about loss and death.  The story takes place on one day.  Colin’s character, George Falconer, is a British college professor in Los Angeles in 1962, who awakes distraught and drained, re-living his grief over the death of his partner who recently died in an accident.   George calmly decides to commit suicide and makes all the preparations, and, without revealing his intentions, tells his literature class that death is what the future holds for us, what we are all waiting for, what we are all about, all facing at one time or another.  “It” comes to us all.   During the course of the day, however, he meets a new lover, a student, and rediscovers how to “feel.”   At the end of the film, in the middle of the night, George awakens with a moment of clarity, discovering that everything is in order and life is as it is meant to be, not always easy, but ordered after all.  He destroys his suicide note and locks his gun away.  He steps out the back door, and is startled by an owl that takes flight, its silver wings spread before him.  He smiles and walks back to bed, but suffers a heart attack at that moment.  As he is lying on the floor in his pajamas, dying, the vision or spirit of his lost partner arrives over him and kisses him, and the movie ends with George’s calm acceptance and the words “it came.”  This is a comforting view of death, that it is what we are all  preparing for and not to be feared.  It will, of course, come.  In addition to being about death and the natural order of things, the movie is also about mourning and recovery, the recovery of balance on George’s part.

The other great part of the film is that is it stylish, as would be expected from designer, now director, Tom Ford.  The movie has a wonderful cool and intellectual mood created by the reserved, stoic Colin Firth character, and by southern California of 1962.  For the protagonist’s home, Ford used a mid-century modern John Lautner house, with its Japanese-influenced redwood wooden panels and mixture of garden and glass.  In the background is talk of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on television and radio, but this is not important, barely thought of by the intellectual protagonist.  What is important are his relationships with people, animals, and ideas.  We get glimpses of his sensibilities.  He tells his class that fear is what causes anti-Semitism and other paranoia.  He takes a moment to smell the fur of a neighbor’s fox terrier,  saying that reminded him of his youth in England, the smell of buttered toast.

Substance and style combine in “A Single Man.”  I admire the handling of the subject matter, and I long for the wonderful 1948 Lautner house, reminding me of Wright, Neutra, Schindler, Koenig, the Eameses and Greenes, etc.  I will have to make another trip to L.A.