Saturday 17 May 2014

REVIEW - THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY (HOSSEIN AMINI)


It is a personal policy that I have, not to judge a film on what it is not, but on what it is. Not on what it is missing, but what it possesses. The Two Faces of January feels consistently like a film striving for what it is not, though, which makes that policy difficult to uphold. It is a film full of the suggestion of artistic merit and psychological complexity, bursting at the seams with brilliance, but in diminution. And yet, for such a supposedly suspenseful film with so much ambition, it's a strangely sedate affair, seemingly content in its mediocrity. Patricia Highsmith's ostensibly conventional narrative serves as a solid foundation on which she is able to construct a more detailed, volatile story set within the minds of her protagonists. Hossein Amini transforms this cerebral slant and foregrounds it, in effect reversing Highsmith's intentions - the film becomes a catalogue of expected occurrences based on unexpected emotions. These plot machinations were never going to be substantial enough to sustain a film as stylistically inert as this, and Amini's concessions to commercialism wear thin within minutes. On a technical basis, his exotic thriller is of remarkably low impact - Marcel Zyskind films characterful Greek locales with complacency, as if expecting them to naturally imbue his shots with automatic beauty and interest. They don't. Alberto Iglesias' soundtrack is the sole element of high quality, though even he's a little off his game. The almost unrelenting focus on the plot's three core figures doesn't grow too tiring, actually, due to solid performances, though again there's a sense that these actors are capable of considerably more than they bring to these parts.

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