@Tom_Shone
THE SCREENING ROOM TOM FORD has sent his second SOS from within the citadel of fashion. From whom or what does he need rescuing? Perhaps the thing that’s most detrimental to Ford’s health as an artist, as well as the thing that gets him out of bed in the morning: his perfectionism. There was barely a frame of his first film, A Single Man (2009), starring Colin Firth as a gay English professor mourning his dead lover, that didn’t feel embalmed in its own amber-tinted beauty. The film ached, but its emotions felt like photo ops—everything just so. Exiting the cinema, you wanted to shout, splash puddles, paint with mud, anything except examine the flawless crease in Firth’s pants for signs of the mussed soul within.
In Nocturnal Animals, Ford has had the good sense to flush his own fusspot aestheticism out into the open. The film, which plays like a stylish piece of self-torment, stars Amy Adams as Susan, a sleek, successful owner of a Los Angeles gallery whose huge glass-and-steel apartment looks untouched by human hands and whose marriage to a handsome broker (Armie Hammer) is scarcely any warmer. Susan’s most recent installation—which her husband doesn’t bother to attend—features a video series of a group of garishly made-up, overweight majorettes who cavort like Lynchian whores, in pointed rebuke to the glassy perfection of Susan’s world. There, Ford seems to say. Put them on the cover of Vogue.