Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Single Man
2009 · Tom Ford · A Single Man on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the color warm up when something reaches George. (light)
The baseline is drained and slightly sick. Skin, reds and greens flood back whenever George is briefly held by someone or something, sometimes inside a single shot. Then it drains again.
Payoff: Color is George's pulse made visible. The grade is not decoration here. It is the film's main instrument. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: color that absorbs the feeling of a scene instead of describing an object in it.
Listen for the few sounds the mix leaves in. (sound)
A clock, a pen on paper, breath, a lighter, a sprinkler down the block. Everything else drops out. The track keeps narrowing to whatever George's attention has just landed on.
Payoff: Perception swells because it has nowhere to go. The pen is loud because the day has nothing else to do. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. The reading calls these pure optical and sound situations: a man who can only look and listen, with no action open to him.
Count how long a close-up on a mouth holds. (camera)
Eduard Grau shoots eyes, mouths, hands and the back of a neck at magnification, and holds them past any narrative need. Bodies get looked at frankly. The camera drifts or pushes slowly and never settles.
Payoff: Noticing is the whole event here. Nothing follows from the looking, which is what makes it hurt.
Notice the small delay before George answers anyone. (performance)
Firth plays composure as a performance George is giving to himself. The English courtesy is armor. The face holds one quality rather than running through reactions, and it very rarely breaks.
Payoff: Watch for the two or three places the seal gives. Firth built the part out of what he subtracts. In the reading: icon of quality (reflecting face). The reading calls this a reflecting face: nearly still, holding one quality, instead of moving through a series of reactions.
Look at the glass walls of George's house. (setting)
The Lautner house puts his whole domestic life on view, with the neighbors next door living the sanctioned version. Inside, the tailoring, the desk objects and the laid-out cufflinks are all arranged.
Payoff: Control over surfaces is the last structure holding him up. When a life is lived partly in secret, style is load-bearing.
Once you have seen it
Track how Jim enters the film. (cutting)
No dissolves, no optical markers, no cushion. Joan Sobel cuts him in mid-thought, sometimes for a few frames, sometimes for a long scene on a sofa with two dogs. Past and present share one grammar.
Payoff: The past is not a subordinate clause here. It is a place he is standing in, which is what early grief is like.
Listen to the phone call that delivers the news. (sound)
An uncredited stranger, polite and careful, explains that the funeral is for family only. The cruelty arrives inside ordinary courtesy. Firth plays it closer to physical injury than to weeping.
Payoff: There is a room where the loss is being mourned and he is not allowed in it. That exclusion is the wound.
Watch George try to find a position to shoot himself. (cutting)
Sobel cuts the rehearsal for deadpan comedy, which appears nowhere else in the film. He tries the bed, the floor, the shower, and ends up zipped into a sleeping bag so he will not leave a mess.
Payoff: Draining the act of drama turns it into a problem of posture. Ford knew the film could not stay solemn throughout.
Watch the underwater shots come back through the film. (camera)
A body suspended, hair drifting, the sound gone thick. George does not swim in them. He is carried. The refrain returns at intervals and never advances the plot.
Payoff: The figure goes still and the world does the moving. That is the condition the whole day is describing.
Carry this in: Watch the color drain rather than the color flood. The cold stretches are the film's real clock.