Didsbury - Community Index

More documents

Recommendations

Info

12 On the Sofa with Gilly Kingham A Single Man George (Colin Firth) lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles in a glass house. Such flaunting transparency which announces nothing to hide is of course the perfect camouflage for a man receded into a grief that in the America of 1962 has no acceptable public discourse. For George’s heart has been broken – a circumstance literalised into a diseased heart – by the death of his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), who, we learn in a series of dream sequences and flashbacks, has been killed in a car crash while visiting family in Colorado. Based on a novella by Christopher Isherwood, Tom Ford’s film traces a single day in George’s life. This is to be George’s death day – a fact rather clunkily foreshadowed by the pistol that George carts about all day in his brief case. Still, Ford’s camera invests the outward almost-normalcy with which this English Literature professor pursues his day with the wonder of moments as if seen for the last time. Such a construction of inward perception is given greater poignancy in its contrast with George’s strictly phatic interactions with the Kodachrome-bright all-American nuclear family that lives opposite and his work colleagues. Even his long-standing friend, fellow Brit, Charley (Julianne Moore) – a woman washed-up in middle-age, the gin-soaked flotsam of a feminine stereotype which she has discovered too late has an upper-age limit – fails to comprehend George’s despair, adding to the accumulating cruelties of a heterosexual world by suggesting that his relationship with Jim was somehow not ‘real’. It is only George’s student, Kenny (Matthew Hoult), noticing the ‘almost’ in George’s behaviour – the lecture on Aldous Huxley’s ‘After Many a Summer’ diverted by a bored question into a consideration of the basis of all prejudice in fear of the other; more prosaically, the clearing of his office – who attempts a searching inquiry. George, typically scrupulous about the protocols of teacher-student relations, seeks to evade Kenny’s overtures of intimacy by means of the refracting mirrors of a self-ironising personal style. Kenny, however, proves not so easily deflected. Firth is marvellous in his portrayal of repression articulated in metonymies – the flinch of a jaw muscle, the tic of an eyelid, the spill of a tear – and captured by Ford’s insistent close-up camera. Sometimes, however, Ford, best known as a designer of luxury goods, seems to forget himself and we are treated, for example, to Firth and Goode sunbathing in vests against a bare snaggle of rock, an image resembling an über-chic black and white fashion plate discovered in the pages of Vogue or GQ, but apparently gratuitous to the filmic narrative other than as a kind of fetishised time-out. It is of course ironic that Ford’s first film should have as its historical context the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, one of those defining moments in the encounter with the Soviet other against which America constituted the meaning of freedom as consumerist heaven. Nonetheless, there is much to like about this film. And I liked it a lot.
Design • Print • Delivery A5 Leaflets Full Colour, double sided 100 1,000 5,000 £45 £85 Business Cards Full Colour, double sided 350gsm 100 250 500 £22 £35 £149 £199 £49 DESIGN SERVICE AVAILABLE 10,000 1,000 £69 Letterheads • Compliment Slips Flyers • Leaflets • Stickers • NCR Leaflet Delivery Service From: £35 per 1,000 13 0787 589 5604 print@communityindex.co.uk
Page 1 and 2: community Didsbury August 2010 inde
Page 3 and 4: August 2010 CONTENTS 1 Welcome to t
Page 5 and 6: 3 “The postures of Satyananda Yog
Page 7 and 8: A free 15 minute consultation can b
Page 9 and 10: 7 Tomatoes stuffed with quinoa Serv
Page 11 and 12: 9 Didsbury community Didsbury commu
Page 13: workshop run by our own stand-up co
Page 17 and 18: 15 Cheshire Shutters Made to measur
Page 19 and 20: DO YOU HAVE WINDOW PAINS Call 0161
Page 21 and 22: May 2010 REGISTERED CHIROPODIST The
Page 23 and 24: Business Index 21 Acupuncture Zone

Didsbury - Community Index

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?