Hossein Amini (2014)

Well known as a screenwriter – of films such as Jude (1996), The Wings of the Dove (1997), Drive (2011) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) – Hossein Amini is directing his first feature here.  The dynamics of the three main actors are strong:  for much of the time, I was absorbed by these as much as by the story, which Amini adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel of the same name.  Neither Viggo Mortensen nor, to a lesser extent, Oscar Isaac seems ethnically right for his role but it’s always interesting to watch good actors grappling with parts in which they’re somewhat miscast.  An American couple, Chester McFarland and his much younger wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst), are holidaying in Greece.  They meet and strike up a relationship with a compatriot, a tour guide called Rydal Keener (Isaac).  I don’t mean to suggest that a moneyed American tourist in Europe in 1962 was bound to have been brashly extrovert but Mortensen’s low-key playing and his reserve do tend to limit the dramatic effect of the series of reverses suffered by Chester McFarland.  When the fair-haired, suntanned couple are first seen in their cream and white clothes strolling around the Parthenon, the McFarlands exude a golden ease and complacency but it’s soon plain to see – too soon and too plain – the thinness of Chester’s veneer.  Later on, when he’s drunk and scared, Mortensen doesn’t convey enough crude anger; he’s too exotic and classy as an American who’s meant to have worked his way up from a bad start in life (shades of A History of Violence).  There are no such problems with Kirsten Dunst’s characterisation of Colette:  she’s entirely persuasive as a woman who knows how attractive she is and likes lightly flirting with other men but only as a prelude to enjoying her handsome husband and the material treats he provides her with.  Colette appears to know that Chester’s financial dealings are shady; provided they sustain her comfortable, pleasurable life and no one calls Chester to account, she doesn’t really care.

Of course, Chester is called to account.  He and Colette are preparing to make love when there’s a knock on their hotel room door.  They’ve just returned from an evening with Rydal and his temporary companion Lauren (Daisy Bevan), a pretty and innocent American girl whom we saw the young tour guide cheat of a few drachmas at the café where he first got into conversation with the McFarlands.  Rydal discovers that, when his new acquaintances got out of the taxi taking the foursome back to their hotels, Colette left behind the bracelet that he helped Chester buy for her from a local vendor (with this transaction too, Rydal haggles his way – in modern Greek which the McFarlands don’t have – to personal profit).  When that knock comes on the couple’s door, you assume it’s Rydal with the bracelet.  It turns out to be an American private detective (David Warshofsky), who’s tracked down Chester, on behalf of people he cheated of their investments.  The detective and Chester talk then struggle in the en suite bathroom; the former falls and hits his head on the tiled floor.   Rydal arrives in the corridor just as Chester is trying to drag the detective back to the latter’s own hotel room.  Chester asks Rydal to help him, explaining that the unconscious man is blind drunk.  In fact, as Chester already knows, he’s dead.  The McFarlands, in order to make a quick exit from the hotel, have to leave their passports behind in it.  Rydal knows a local who can forge replacements but there will be a delay of a few days.  The trio set off for Heraklion to take cover there in the meantime.

One of the first queries about the plotting of the story is whether it’s credible that Rydal believes what Chester tells him about the man being merely drunk.  I think it is – just.  Rydal is pleased with himself for being plausible, for being able to exploit the goodwill and gullibility of fellow Americans to line his own pocket.  He’s nevertheless pretty naïve:  this young man who attaches himself to glamorous compatriots is no Tom Ripley; compared with Chester McFarland, Rydal is microscopically small fry in the world of financial swindlers.   He’s distanced himself from a privileged life in America – a life dominated by an academic father whose funeral, we soon find out, his son failed to return home for.   Oscar Isaac’s opacity was a problem in Inside Llewyn Davis:  the Coen brothers’ script made it clear how Llewyn was supposed to be and Isaac didn’t illustrate this conception.  But his hard-to-read quality really works for him in The Two Faces of January – especially in the early stages, when you’re trying to size up Rydal.  He is also able to show here a charm that the Coens wouldn’t have wanted the audience to see.  Isaac suggests an anxious loneliness under Rydal’s initially affable exterior; his performance would have been even better if he’d combined these qualities with a sense that Rydal has had a pampered past.  Even so, his work in The Two Faces of January makes me keen to see what he does next.  I didn’t expect that after watching him as Llewyn Davis.

When Chester first sees Rydal watching him and Colette in the cafe, he’s immediately suspicious and he remains so, even when he’s forced to rely on Rydal to get him out of a tight spot.  The suspicion is always that Rydal desires Colette and Chester’s instinct is sound (otherwise, Rydal would presumably have sold on rather than returned the bracelet).  The shifts in the balance of power between the two men are absorbing:  after the incident in the hotel, Rydal seems to have the upper hand but, when he learns from the newspapers and radio that the supposedly drunk man was a corpse and he tackles Chester about it, the latter reminds Rydal that he’s an accessory after the fact.  Colette’s fearful, wavering loyalty to her husband when the going gets tough is right too. In a shocking echo of the death in the bathroom, Colette, during an argument with Chester (she rightly thinks he’s trying to get rid of Rydal), falls to her death in the caves at Knossos.  I didn’t get why, after the discovery of Colette’s body, the attention of the Greek police switched from the hotel death to hers – or how, since photographs of both Chester and Colette appeared in the papers as wanted in connection with the private detective’s death, Chester was able to try and frame Rydal for Colette’s murder.   It was probably me, but I found the storytelling less and less clear from this point onwards.  By the time the film reaches its climax in Turkey, Rydal is working for the FBI, trying to get Chester to confess to what’s happened and eventually succeeding as the older man, shot by the police as he tries to escape, gasps all in his dying breaths.   The American authorities can’t trace any next of kin for Chester and he’s therefore buried in Turkey.  The Two Faces of January ends with Rydal’s visiting the freshly dug grave and leaving in it the bracelet that he never did return to Colette.

Sophie Mayer’s negative review in Sight and Sound takes Hossein Amini to task for losing the ‘homoerotic’ aspect of the relationship between Chester and Rydal that Mayer sees as part of the strength of the Highsmith novel.  Amini certainly does eliminate this element – to the extent that I neither suspected any such attraction between the two men nor can see what it would have brought to the story.  What is a strong feature of the film is the father-son motif.  At the very start, Rydal tells his party of American tourists of Theseus’s return from Naxos to Athens, how he forgot to change his sails from black to white with the result that Theseus’s dismayed father Aegeus took his own life.  Rydal’s father is an archaeology professor so his son, steeped in ancient Greece even as a tour guide, has hardly escaped him entirely.  At one point, in order to avoid the suspicion of Greek border police, Rydal tells them that he’s Chester son.  And the closing scene in the Turkish cemetery obviously brings to mind the funeral of his own father that Rydal didn’t attend.   Chester and Rydal’s competing for Colette has no less obvious Oedipal possibilities although, for all Rydal’s callowness, her youthfulness tends to muffle these (Kirsten Dunst is actually younger than Oscar Isaac).  Although it gathers conventionally melodramatic pace in its last half hour, the film loses what has been a more distinctive momentum once Colette has died.  Until then, Amini supplies his three leads with some good dialogue and he directs them imaginatively.  You get a strong sense of changes in mood – and that the characters are aware of these changes – but you often get it through surprising, inventive vocal inflections.   Both the lighting by Marcel Zyskind and the music by Alberto Iglesias are effective.  The latter’s score naturally reminds you of his contributions to Almodovar movies but that’s not a problem:  the alluring and dangerous complexities of desire are an integral part of The Two Faces of January too.

19 May 2014