Ford’s aesthetic visions on display in ‘Nocturnal’
Los Angeles — First thing on a recent Monday morning and Tom Ford looked more impeccably put-together than just about anyone else on their most glamorous Saturday night out.
Dressed in a sharp black suit and a crisp white shirt, he strode across his austere West Hollywood workroom/office to greet a visitor, everything around him seeming an extension of a singular aesthetic vision.
In the world of fashion, Ford has designed under the labels of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent as well as the company that bears his own name, his sleek, sexy clothes becoming the contemporary epitome of off-handed luxury.
Ford introduced himself as a filmmaker with 2009’s “A Single Man,” which earned actor Colin Firth an Academy Award nomination, and his new work, “Nocturnal Animals,” is out this weekend.
Ford’s day job as one of the world’s best-known and most successful fashion designers puts him in an unusual position regarding his filmmaking.
While audiences and critics may bring expectations that his movies occupy the same precise world as his fashion work, Ford sees them as very different endeavors with very different purposes for him.
“Well, I’m not doing it to make money. I make my money doing other things,” he said. “Fashion is where I make my living, and so consequently, when I design a fragrance, I think, ‘Is this going to sell? I love it, OK, but is it going to sell?’ And that’s not the way I think when I approach film. It’s ‘What do I want to say?’ ”
In the coolly unnerving “Nocturnal Animals,” Ford takes on the empty consumerism and lack of personal connection in modern life, which might also be seen as something of a rebuke of his other career. Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles fine-art dealer weary of her high-end world, who receives a package from her ex Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) containing a novel dedicated to her.
As she reads the book, she imagines its story in her mind, as a man named Tony Hastings (also played by Gyllenhaal) has his wife and daughter taken from him after a confrontation with the dangerous Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a barren stretch of desert highway.
Tony later enlists the help of local lawman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to help him get answers and possibly revenge.
Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough, Laura Linney, Jena Malone and Isla Fisher all pass through in brief supporting turns as the film becomes a complicated treatise on memory, meaning and materialism.
Pretty much anyone looking at “A Single Man,” an adaptation of the novel by Christopher Isherwood in which Firth plays a man named George Falconer who is contemplating suicide, or the psychologically intense “Nocturnal Animals” wants to make comparisons with the strong iconography of Ford’s fashion and advertising work.
In particular, “Nocturnal Animals” makes savage satire of a world of glamour and artifice that feels like it could be familiar to Ford. Yet for him, the two endeavors remain distinct.
“They’re not comparable,” Ford said. “Because fashion, I’m just making surface. It not about what’s inside, it’s surface. Film, the surface has got to be there to serve the character, to serve the story.
“The personality of the brand is totally different than telling a story. While that comes from me, that doesn’t have anything to do with who I am inside, deeply inside. Whereas film can be about what you are deeply inside.”