REVIEWS
Reviews edited by Mark Adams mark.adams@screendaily.com
The Two Faces Of January Reviewed by Fionnuala Halligan The award-winning writer Hossein Amini (The Wings Of The Dove, Drive) makes his directorial debut with a taut, elegant adaptation of a lesser known 1964 Patricia Highsmith novel, The Two Faces Of January. Amini positively embraces the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, from content to period style to ‘the blonde’, to deliver a quiet thoroughbred for the StudioCanal/Working Title stable, which has produced both Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener, and should seduce exactly the same audience with smooth precision. Adapting the complex novel himself, Amini has turned its close relationship with Strangers On A Train and The Talented Mr Ripley to his advantage, pushing off from Hitchcock and Anthony Minghella to try his own hand at the double-crisscross through Europe. He knows their earlier works shadow his characters onscreen, but this film is still unpredictable and emotionally rich. This is in no small part due to Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac as the Highsmith doppelgangers (with Isaac more than consolidating his star turn from Inside Llewyn Davis). Kirsten Dunst also hits all the right notes with restraint. The Two Faces Of January is certainly a looker, set in 1962 Greece and Turkey, shot crisply by Marcel Zyskind and scored with restraint by Alberto Iglesias. The locations, of course — with the opportunity for 1960s set dressing and costumes against the backdrop of the Acropolis and Knossos — are a Hitchcockian dream for the art department and immediately set the spirit of the piece.
n 8 Screen International at Berlin February 12, 2014
BERlINAlE SPECIAl UK-US-Fr. 2013. 96mins Director/screenplay Hossein Amini Production companies Working Title Films, Timnick Films International sales StudioCanal, ronald. halpern@canal-plus.com Producers Robyn Slovo, Tom Sternberg, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner Executive producers Tim Bricknell, Ron Halpern, Max Minghella Cinematography Marcel Zyskind Editors Nicolas Chaudeurge, Jon Harris Production designer Michael Carlin Music Alberto Iglesias Main cast Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, Oscar Isaac, David Warshofsky, Daisy Bevan, Prometheus Aleifer
Handsome young American Rydal Keener (Isaac) is a Greek-speaking tour guide in Athens, content with skimming money from US exchange students, when he spots the elegant couple Chester and Colette MacFarland (Mortensen and Dunst) at the Parthenon. Rydal is initially attracted to the suave, worldly Chester but also to his much younger wife. Rydal becomes willingly embroiled with the couple, and inadvertently complicit in a death that may or may not be murder. Bit by bit, Chester reveals his true colours and Rydal finds himself more and more compromised as the trio flees to Crete and across the Greek countryside in a bus in the full heat of summer. You would not wish to be part of this road trip, however, and Rydal will need to up his game to survive. It is not certain whether anyone in The Two Faces
Of January ever completely shows their cards, and it is this delicious ambiguity that propels the film across Crete and into Turkey, with the pursuit really hotting up in Istanbul. This is played out delicately by the actors, with Mortensen’s increasingly dishevelled desperation and cunning counter-balanced by Isaac’s open-faced duplicity. Originally optioned by producer Tom Sternberg (The Talented Mr Ripley) and briefly set up at Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella’s Mirage — both are acknowledged in the credits — for Amini to direct, The Two Faces Of January eventually shot in autumn 2012, premiering this week here at the Berlinale. That is quite a delay, but this project has clearly been handled with care throughout its half-century-long journey from the page to screen, and many should find it was worth the wait.