A Single Man

My gay friend smsed me again the other day as part of our little on-going virtual conversation. We keep each other updated of our lives this way.

That particular sms update included the latest film he had caught with his partner. It was A Single Man by Tom Ford.

And, boy, was he right about the film being extravagant. The glass house was perfect (I love the kitchen), the suits were perfect, the hair, the car, the protagonist as an British Professor of English in the States, the books, that handgun, the dancing, the boys... ahhh... the beautiful boys... Perfect faces of youth... and its attendant seduction.

I saw the film at the Cathay (as always), and noticed that the crowd was unusually gay. That, to me, was the most cliche bit of the entire experience. Because the film, though the protagonist was gay, was not exactly about homosexuality. It's about the absurdity of one's existence in the face of hollow loss and loneliness. Adding homosexuality to the story was, I thought, more for aesthetics.

And Julianne Moore is just... exquisite. Her face and her character in the film are made for each other. If I had to be old and lonely, I wanna at least look half as good as she did in the film. Because beneath all that existential mumbo jumbo, aesthetics, like void, is a kind of truth, isn't it?