Single Man, 2009 (Grade A-)

Director: Tom Ford
 Awards? Starring: lots of nominations for best actor--and won best actor from BAFTA, also some niminationf for Julianne Moore
Cast: Colin Firth; Julianne Moore; Matthew Goode; Nicholas Hoult; Ginnifer Goodwin; Paulette Lamori; Ryan Simpkins; Nichole Steinwedell; Paul Butler; Lee Pace

sez sasy--what a genius Colin Firth is! He should have run off with all the awards for acting this year.  That he didn't is probably because Hollywood is afraid to use the box-office power of its awards to send the movie going public to see a film about gay men that is this sensuous.   Firth plays the part of a man in grief:  He is gay and he has lost his lover of 16 years in an auto accident. His lover's family doesn't even tell him what has happened and won't allow him to attend the funeral.  The story says that  gays were invisible and treated inhumanely in the 1960s: "Light in the loafers" the neighbor calls him.  He is a man of taste and style and education who must stay invisible so as not to frighten the world--because if the world becomes frighted he will be persecuted.  This is a nuanced performance: spot-on perfectly acted.  Buttressing Firth is an equally wonderful performance by Julianne Moore. Firth's dear friend --and even she doesn't really understand that his relationship was 'real' -- too bad, she says, that they didn't marry and have a 'real relationship'   How sad. The lighting and color alters from scene to scene--sometimes being nearly B&W and other times vivid color. This, I believe to suggest to what extend Firth's character is tending toward life (for instance when he is about young men)  and or falling into a numb pit of despair and planning suicide. I'd say the only downside is that the story is about an OLDER MAN than Colin Firth.  If he has been much older his despair would have been even more acutely felt and understood. That he was still relatively young and ever so handsome makes it hard to think that his life was over--as the plot suggests. Still a great movie-- (Grade A-)