On Drowning

I watched two films in quick succession last night: A Single Man and Twilight: New Moon. Before you ask, yes I realize that these films cater to very different audiences, but I do these comparisons so you don't have to! They actually share much in common: thematically, both look at the subject of lost love, and interestingly, both prominently feature the motif of drowning.

Tom Ford's directorial debut, based on Christopher Isherwood's book and aimed as it is, to a more adult audience, is a beauty in restraint. The eponymous main character played by Colin Firth only voices over at the start and at the end, and even then more to provide a structural symmetry to the film than to elaborate, so you are left to experience the ravages of his loss, the struggles with containment of his emotion under a sedate demeanour, and his subsequent recovery and salvation, all obliquely through observation. The drowning imagery appears interspersed throughout the film and draws upon his helpless stuggles, despair and sense of morbidity. It was so moving the Pink Insider teared up at least twice.

In contrast, New Moon, based on Stephanie Meyer's vampire book and therefore aimed at peri-pubescents, follows Bella's own experience of a lost love, only instead of dying, her partner talks about it for about half an hour before just moving somewhere else. This of course, causes the heroine a considerable amount of pain and angst which she reminds you of incessantly by screaming at night and, lest you missed that she was upset, goes on and on about it in her non-stop voice overs. So when she decides to jump off the side of a cliff into the cold seas below, you almost wish she would drown, if only to stop all her inane chatter.

I know which film I prefer.