"The Two Faces of January" (movie)

It’s the directorial debut of Hossein Amini, the British-Iranian screenwriter best-known for a plum pair of adaptations: his Oscar-nominated 1997 script for The Wings of the Dove, and then the terse core that he gave to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). His skill as a scenarist shines through in this three-person rummy game - it’s tightly engineered and doesn’t waste words. But it’s also a treat to look at and listen to, evoking a lot of old-fashioned movie virtues, and showing us a lush but suspenseful good time.

From the start, as holidaying Americans Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst) take a turn around the Parthenon in 1962, we get that tingle that comes with feeling in safe hands. Amini has borrowed a cinematographer, Marcel Zyskind, from Michael Winterbottom, and a composer, Alberto Iglesias, from Pedro Almódovar. Their combined efforts are seductive but also expressive, honed to a purpose. And the lemon dress Dunst is wearing may be the most perfectly stylish thing we’ve ever seen her in. You want her performance to live up to her gorgeous look, and it does.

                                                     

This couple, the MacFarlands, have escaped for the summer, and for a brief stretch they look like prey, at least to the unscrupulous gaze of a small-time con artist called Rydal (Oscar Isaac). Handsome as a faun, this devil has been charming young travellers as a tour guide, then exploiting their faulty Greek to short-change them, a tactic he tries out on these two fellow Americans at a street market. His hand around Colette’s wrist, as he helps her to try on a bracelet, is a virtual promise of amorous frissons to come. But there turns out to be larceny on both sides.

Chester’s a crook, having sold non-existent stocks to gullible investors in the States, and made off to Greece a wanted man, with wads of their cash in his suitcase.

We’re told early on that Chester bears a strong resemblance to Rydal’s recently deceased father – it seems to draw them together. Amini folds in the myth of Theseus – he of the maze and the Minotaur – and the tragic fate of his father Aegeus. These motifs are there to get us to the climax, which is excitingly unpredictable while also being a minor problem area: it feels as though the groundwork has been diligently laid, but what’s missing is a more visceral credibility, somehow.

   

Nevertheless, Mortensen and Isaac excel at the push-pull of this wary partnership, a pact between swindlers. There’s an edge of alpha-male sparring as they get the measure of each other, pressing for weak spots. In a sense, each takes turns as the Minotaur – they end up literally circling around the maze at Knossos. But it’s also a tale of two Ripleys, senior and junior, who find their fates intertwined, their wiles and values mutually challenged.

Between them, the equally impressive Dunst is like a version of Marge – Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in The Talented Mr Ripley – if she was in on the intrigue, and increasingly unsure of whose side to take. She’s on rare, Melancholia form, just as the wonderfully shady Isaac is as good as he was in Inside Llewyn Davis, and Mortensen, who can wear the hell out of cream linen suits, is at his intellectually acerbic best. Amini gets such terrific work from the three of them, and from his enviable crew, that you have to say that he’s passed the first-feature test with flying colours.

There are many attractive parts to this thriller – handsome leads, a meaty Patricia Highsmith plot, Mediterranean sunlight on cream linen suits – but it's no greater than the sum of them. It pitches its characters into hot water with consummate efficiency: Isaac is an American tour guide in 1960s Athens with for a wealthy mark or a pretty woman. He finds both in Mortensen and Dunst's holidaying couple, but their casual acquaintance gets serious after a sudden murder. The sunny landscape becomes shaded with suspicion, deception and sexual jealousy as the trio take flight. Mythological themes are neatly worked in, from Theseus to Oedipus, but Amini primarily draws on another classical tradition here: Anthony Minghella, and his own Highsmith adaptation, The Talented Mr Ripley. That's classy company – mature middle-classy, to be specific – though there's the feeling this would crackle that bit more if it had taken some risks of its own.