Tom Ford’s "A Single Man"

You remember that old saw about there being no second act in American public life. Well, you can achieve it when it comes to Tom Ford, the fashion designer who is busy launching what looks like a very promising career as a film director.

Ford unveiled his debut film, “A Single Man,” at a private screening Monday night in Paris to an audience of critics, old friends and cinema aficionados to a huge round of applause.

An elegant meditation on the trials of the spirit and ability to deal with great loss, the movie was every bit as sophisticated as one would expect from this consummate fashion insider, yet imbued with a soulfulness that might come as something of a surprise.

What, one asked Ford – probably the most commercially successful designer of the nineties during his tenure as creative director of Gucci – were the most difficult perceptions to get over when trying to reinvent himself from fashion honcho to film director?

“Well, there’s this widely held view that if you work in fashion you must be superficial, surface orientated, lacking in depth and soulless. Even some of one’s best friends can think that, like my mother. After she saw the film, she told me, ‘Tom, I never knew you had such feelings,’” smiled Ford with a tilt of the head.

The film was written for the screen by Ford himself and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood. It is the story on one day in the life of George, a dapper, gay English professor in a college in Los Angeles, who, deeply depressed about the recent, sudden death of his long-time lover in a car accident, plans his day around committing suicide before events and a revelatory encounter lead him to view life afresh.

Firth’s George is so depressed and disengaged, he keeps failing to hear people actually speaking to him. The movie, too, begins, in more somber colors, but then grows more vivid, as the character rediscovers a renewed lust for life at the end.

“The book is largely an interior monologue, though what I wanted to make clear was that George, by the time you get to the end the film, has understood something of life,” Ford said after the screening.

Among Ford’s impressive achievements is the powerful performances he draws out of the four principal actors: Firth, as the dry-witted academic; Julianne Moore who plays his best gal pal Charley; Matthew Goode as Jim, the dead lover seen in flashbacks, and Nicholas Hoult as a wide-eyed student Kenny.

Moore’s accent is uncannily like the sort of well-bred girls one noticed shopping in trendy department stores in London, like Biba in the seventies, i.e., a posh ex-pat Brit who does not mind being too loud.

Hoult, best known for his role as the troubled, toothy teenager in “About A Boy," which starred Hugh Grant, is excellent as a coming-of-age college student.

Ford premiered his film at the Venice International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion and Colin Firth won the prize for Best Actor.

“It’s about the isolation that we all can feel at certain moments. If you are going to make a film you have to make it about something,” said Ford, who has spoken many times about the deep blues he went through after losing his position as creative director at Gucci Group, the world’s second largest luxury company.

Ford has not given up his first career, successfully launching his own label with a well-received collection of posh, high-end men’s clothing and accessories, while preparing a women’s line, expected to be unveiled this spring.

Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie expertly captures the era but with the sleek finish one would expect from Ford, whose fashion ad campaigns managed to be glossy yet earthy. Ford's attention to detail in the film was so great, he even had a “casting session” for the professor’s gun, and the house is exactly the sort of classic modernist villa you could imagine Ford living in himself.

“We shot in a John Lautner house in Los Angeles, which was beautiful but tiny, so we had to reconstruct each part of it. The bedroom, kitchen and then living room. But it all happened pretty quickly. We shot it in 21 days and I had only four hours rehearsal together with Julianne and Colin,” explains the gentlemanly Ford, impeccably dressed in a thick silk tie, crocodile skin shoes and black suit with a – single – button.

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