The trailer for the Tom-Ford-directed-gay-period-suspense-drama, A Single Man, is up on youtube.

Tom Ford–formerly of Gucci, then of, well, Tom Ford–explained to the press during the Venice Film Festival (where the film made its debut) that cinema has been a direction he’s wanted to move in “forever,” and called A Single Man is “the most personal thing I’ve ever done; a pure expression.”

Ms. Longworth, for whom I’ve previously professed my love, gave the film an A- at Toronto, calling it both gorgeous and affecting.

I’m skeptical, mostly because the film looks so much like the very best pages of Vanity Fair (which is much like being skeptical because Fantastic Mr. Fox looks as carefully designed as The Royal Tenenbaums; it shouldn’t be a deterrent, but it makes me nervous that that’s all it is).  But Colin Firth is getting quite a buzz for what some are calling his best role on screen to date–and, certainly, you can’t have much of a higher pedigree than Christopher Isherwood (although I haven’t read the original novel).  I am a big fan, as well, of Matthew Goode (excepting that lamentable Brideshead travesty) and Nicholas Hoult (from About A Boy).

The question I’ve been turning over in my head for the past few hours, though, is whether I should be skeptical, in the first place, about any visual artist turning to film.  Shouldn’t the example of former painters–Julian Schnabel, Robert Breer, David Lynch, Peter Hutton–prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that those artists, trained in a purely visual medium (be it painting, sculpture, or, more to the point, fashion), who do make it to film often bring with them extraordinarily cinematic vision?  Don’t I prefer them, as a matter of fact, to the theater-director-turned-filmmakers? With the exception of the very best (Mike Nichols), I do.

I suppose I should wait and see, then, what Tom Ford can do.

Boston Fire is a film for people who love the idea of film itself. All of Peter’s shots are static, braced against a merciless and powerful world, and somehow in the stillness the film metastasizes a curiously engaging realization about how we look at the world. (No one looks at the world like Peter. No one.) All of the frailty of the grain can be seen and cherished, the flicker sanctified, subjected to the amazing images he has captured. Peter converts the frightening simplicity and violence of the fire’s destruction into pure aesthetic pleasure — and it is this conversion that isolates Peter as such a true artist.

But what really cements his work as idiomatic is that they are all left completely silent.

He’s been quoted as saying that what interests him is the area between asleep and awake; that peculiar, unrecognizable place that lets you see things in such a unique way. Dozing off in one of his films is fine, because the experience of engagement with the work is what matters–however it unfolds.


His most recent film, At Sea, is an hour-long silent film comprised entirely of boats.  Yet, after it’s over, you cannot help but feel moved by his images. It reminds me of J.M.W. Turner’s best work — the stuff that he made when he stopped caring. Through the brush strokes, the places where the canvas can still be seen, and the sloppy paint work, remains the powerful qualities of his work. Peter channels Turner’s ability to convert an ordinary landscape into a view of extraordinary truth.