The Two Faces Of January
Hossein Amini
The story: Rydal (Oscar Isaac) is a Greek-speaking American working as a tour guide in Athens in 1962 and scamming tourists on the sly. He meets the elegant Chester (Viggo Mortenson) and his much younger, pretty wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) at the Parthenon and is soon drawn into their world. But hiding behind that well-to-do facade are secrets in Chester’s past threatening to catch up with him. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel of the same name.

Any film that incorporates the engineering intricacies of the Parthenon and the bull-leaping frescoes of the Knossos temple complex on Crete island is one that I would have a soft spot for, due to a personal fascination with ancient Greece.
Also, Rydal promisingly makes a remark early on about the cruel tricks that gods play on men. It seems to set up the movie as some kind of epic Greek tragedy, even though the title is a reference to the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus.
Hossein Amini, best known for his Oscar- nominated screenplay for period drama The Wings Of The Dove (1997), makes his directorial debut here. January is handsomely filmed, but saddled with slow pacing.
It is a good thing that he has a top-notch cast here filling out the core triangle of characters.
Mortenson (A History Of Violence, 2005) has a threatening volatility seething beneath an elegant exterior while Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013) keeps you watching as a man who gets embroiled in something bigger than he bargained for, calculating every step of the way if it is worth his while.
Dunst (Melancholia, 2011) is the woman caught between them and is, by turns, playful, exasperated and vulnerable.
What is interesting are the three sets of relationships among the characters.
Chester and Colette are a couple but their relationship is an unequal one skewed by age and the power that comes from wealth. Rydal is drawn to Colette and their mutual attraction sends Chester into a downward spiral of suspicion and paranoia.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Chester and Rydal is not entirely competitive.
Their paths had crossed in the first place as Chester reminded the latter of his recently deceased father.
The pace picks up towards the end and there is a poignancy to the resolution of a movie that is more intimate character drama than grand crime thriller.
(ST)