Amini: The Two Faces of January (2013)

Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Two Faces Of January is about an American con artist and his wife, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst, who are travelling in Greece when a crime unexpectedly casts them into the company of a young American working abroad, played by Oscar Isaac. As in so many of Highsmith’s novels, there’s a fascination with what happens when men get too close to each other, or when the person who buffers their closeness – usually a woman – is suddenly or dramatically taken out of the picture. However, the film is curiously tactful and circumspect about that fascination, more circumspect than Highsmith herself really, as if Amini were trying to envisage how a contemporary adaptation of the novel might have played. That works particularly well with Isaac – like any number of pretty-faced actors of the 50s and 60s (Montgomery Clift and Farley Granger come to mind), his gaze has a peculiarly bisexual pregnancy, a kind of blanket receptiveness and openness that doesn’t really distinguish between women, men or the camera. At times, his gaze also includes Matt Damon in that category, since this is as much an adaptation of Minghella’s Ripley as anything else, right down to the very shots and sequences that Amini uses to anchor his adaptation, which also culminates with a loose, unsettling homosocial exchange over water. If there is any difference from Minghella, it’s that Amini’s vision is slightly flatter and more stylised – this is Ripley after Mad Men, January after January Jones. Where Minghella revelled in the labyrinthine complications of Ripley, Amini hollows out Highsmith’s novel until it feels more like a parable, if Highsmith could be said to write parables. At the very least, it has the elegance and economy of a short story – it proceeds by evacuation, as the trio's proximity takes them across a series of increasingly desolate Grecian and Cretan landscapes that denude them even as they throw them into greater relief. And while Amini has been heavily billed as the screenwriter of Drive, it’s his adaptation of The Wings of the Dove that underpins the film's paradoxes. Like Henry James, Highsmith is perfect at crafting characters who seem both indisputably homosexual and beyond all suspicion, and Amini’s pregnant voids strive to envisage those two faces at once, while remaining true to both.