Visual Parallels: A Single Man + The Hours

Stephen Daldry's The Hours and Tom Ford's A Single Man are both beautiful movies dealing with the subject of loneliness. The first follows three women, each living in different time, but each of them hopelessly stuck in their lives. The second shows a day of a man who lost his lover and is set on killing himself.

The proximity, the invitation of death is everywhere in these movies but not as much as life is - the sadness of the characters is contrasted so vividly with the color of the flowers, the beauty of the characters' surroundings and finally with childlike innocence - curiously both films have a scene where the protagonist shares some of the painful truth with a child - perhaps because they know a child won't understand enough of it, yet it is still a human being they can confide in. This clash is also even more apparant in that the little girls just begin their lives and the characters they interact with are about to meet the end of theirs.

There are more similarities - the deafening, cleansing power of water - used in both films in fantasy sequences where the characters imagine their final escape, the grief that comes with looking at the photograph of someone we loved, the theme of forbidden love misunderstood by the society. But as usual, let the images speak for themselves:

I want to make something clear - I thought that it was clear with the name of the series but the quick look at the websites linking the parallels posts with comments saying that I'm grasping for straws (and that's the only quotable one) made me realize it's not - this it not a series based on parallels I think are intentional. As the name clearly states these are simply visual parallels I noticed. So if you choose to leave rude comments about it, it just means one thing - you are illiterate, so kindly leave my website and do not link to it.