Designed to death: Tom Ford’s A Single Man

Set a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Tom Ford’s film A Single Man – based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood – crashes with emotion through memorable scenes set in snow and rain, by the fireplace and in the stylized rooms of the ultra modernist redwood and glass house designed by John Lautner (1949). While death is forever, this day in the life of George Falconer (played by Colin Firth) is an exercise in fine detail as the camera wrings new meaning from daily rituals lived in the shadow of death. This article examines the numerous ways in which Ford plays with the substance of life and death through the surfaces of the architecture, the grain of the film and the piercing portrayal of a day in the life of a man who cannot imagine his future.