The third face in January: Reimagining a story

Lola 2022-01-16 08:01:17

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), the original author of "The Two Faces of January" once said, "I don't want to know film directors or approach them. I don't want to interfere with their work. , I don’t want them to interfere with me.” This wish that was difficult to achieve during her lifetime (as early as her youth, her first novel "Stranger on the Train" has been put on stage and screen many times. Hitchcock is also one of her adaptors), which is naturally more difficult to achieve behind her. After all, a person’s life does not only belong to him. Even if it is an ordinary person, his image and even existence are obviously given by those who cast their eyes on him-relatives, friends, lovers, or even on the street. The passers-by-all, and those who can cast their spirits to future generations through their works, their works and lives cannot escape the fate of being reimagined and reinvented. After 15 years of long waiting and planning, Hussein Amini, the director and screenwriter of the movie version of "Two Faces in January," finally got the opportunity to adapt this novel into a movie. Obviously he won’t. He did not give up his privilege of imagination and correction as a latecomer, and made a lot of deletions and changes to the structure and plot of the original work. In the end, he also proved to us with his works that deviation is sometimes an expression of loyalty and love.

Patricia Highsmith

A story always starts with a name. Highsmith, the female writer described by her own publisher as "serious, cruel, hard, neither flattering nor liking others", the first thing that brings us into our consciousness is the "one with two faces". "January"-a bizarre image, disturbing because of its violation of nature, but also with an elusive poetry. She wrote in her other novel "The Price of Salt": "January is a month with two faces, clinking like a jester's bell, crackling like a snow shell, like a beginning Just as pure, as gloomy as an old man, it feels incredibly familiar and unfamiliar, like an elusive word close at hand." And since the protagonists in Highsmith's works are all deviant or amiable perverts, then When we cross the title page of the novel and enter the territory governed by Strange January, what we should expect should probably be an uncomfortable dark journey.

Chester, a despicable financial scammer, entices his "customers" to buy stocks that do not exist with good terms. Beneath his decent appearance is a rock of selfishness and cruelty. But even for such a person, he is right His wife’s love and his concern for her are still real; Colette, innocent and charming, with instinct and a thin sense of morality, has lived a life that a female secretary could not have achieved, but she also gave herself away. On a journey of escape and the unknown; Rydal, an Ivy League graduate who escaped from the usual path of life and would eventually return as scheduled, because he came across a liar who described as his father but with a completely different personality, because of his unstoppable curiosity And the indescribable desire, and was drawn into a vortex full of fraud, betrayal, wit, and calculation. In the story produced by the interweaving of the fate of the three people, what Highsmith is most concerned about is obviously the psychological reactions and activities of each person in the face of a specific situation. Apprehension" (Graham Green).

And under those intelligible psychological planes, there seems to be a deeper and more incalculable space-time, where the three protagonists are not independent individuals, but are a part of a larger existence, those belonging to Their things also belong to the broader existence: youth and middle age, sex and love, opportunity and destiny, conflict and reconciliation... This of course is what Highsmith said of January: January is external, it is the street The cafe, the sky, and the port are also internal. It is love, jealousy, anxiety, and panic. It is the life itself that emerges in this particular month. "I don't believe in the happiness of human life." Such Highsmith's January is divided and conflicted. The two faces are always irreconcilable. Wherever they look, they will raise anxiety and anxiety.

However, January with two faces does not belong to Highsmith. Like her adaptors, she is only a later imaginer and corrector-the Roman god Janus hidden in the name January is the real January. Owner. It is the god of beginning, way, change, time, passage, and end. Its duality is a duality of flow and transformation; its two faces, one looking towards the past and the other looking towards the future; it is in charge of a conflict The beginning and end of the war, so it is also in charge of war and peace. Ancient myths and modern criminal psychological stories form a counterpoint and echo, and even in the confrontation and tension between divine power and nature, Highsmith, a writer who scorns justice ("I found that the public’s desire for justice is both boring and contrived. Because both life and nature don’t care about fairness and injustice”), the characters in her pen finally lead to a near-just ending: Colette tragically lost his youth after spending a happy and luxurious life. Life; Chester, under his inner selfish and cruel rock formations, there is still a dark river of human nature flowing. His act of repentance while dying has returned the possibility of life to Rydal and changed it. The meaning of his own ending has restored the secret justice of the world to a trace of balance; and Rydal, after paying the price of going to a dead end for his temporary arrogance, finally completed the reconciliation with the past and with his father-he can finally reconcile Turning his eyes from the past to the future, to a new life. Even the Greek policeman who lost his life innocently, his life, the courage to commit to a dangerous profession, will last forever in the lives of his relatives, friends, and colleagues. When a writer goes against her own inclination and nature to create, it may be because of the influence and requirements of a cultural tradition, or it may be because of the guidance and call from a higher place in her consciousness: as if from January’s The gazes radiating from the two faces are so old and so strange, but still—if we don’t lose the last spirit in the godless world—can pass through a long time to reach one The darkest part of people.

What the film director Hussein Amini wants to tell is obviously the same story, but also a different story that belongs to him. A person always starts from where he stands, that is to say from his prejudices, to understand the world, or to create a story. No matter how much Amini likes Highsmith's story, his inclinations, his temperament, and his creative tools are so different from the latter. Highsmith's story space is introverted. Whether it is a hotel, a street or a landscape, it is just a kind of "periphery" of the characters' psychological activities. The psychology is not subordinate to the environment, but the environment is subordinate to the psychology; what the reader has experienced and read , Seems to be just a psychological process; and film, as a visual and auditory art, sent us back to an extroverted world from the very beginning: Athens in the 1960s, among the ruins of the white temple, the heterogeneous sunlight And time belongs to an era that has disappeared. Amini made a lot of adjustments to the plot: Chester is hard to say resemble Rydal’s father in appearance; the three established a near-friendly relationship from the beginning, instead of waiting for Chester to dispose of the police body. The Greek police became a private detective from the United States; in the maze, Chester didn’t want to kill Rydal, but just wanted to stun him and get rid of him... These changes can be said to be only technical The two creators are really different in their temperaments and tendencies: as a person with extreme personality, ("Happy and happy people are happy fools"), Highsmith cares about the extreme reactions of people in extreme situations. And psychological, so that sometimes, her handling of the plot has reached an unreasonable level (Who would really help a stranger dispose of a corpse, just because this person looks like her own father? Chester is of course a A despicable and unscrupulous person, but if he really wants to kill Rydal, will he have another act of salvation before death?), Amini is obviously a balanced and temperate director and screenwriter, in his In the story, everything seems reasonable, everything seems mature and old (his blank space when dealing with the relationship between Ryder and Colette directly sends the audience into the nameless disturbance and ambiguous imagination). Highsmith’s Spirit in the Sky will undoubtedly hate Amini’s adaptation. For an extreme person, balance, temperance, and maturity are probably the most forgivable sins and betrayals, and we, as readers and viewers, obviously have the right I will inevitably proceed from my own temperament and choose to like a torturous psychological journey, or a movie story with both sensory pleasure, the interweaving of light and shadow and the ruins, and the deep outline of human nature.

However, in the final analysis, novels and movies are still different variants of the same story. They are interpretations and expressions of the same archetype. In a sense, this seemingly extreme and bizarre story is also our story, just like Amini In an interview, he said: "...The characters in Highsmith's pen are often criminals, which makes it difficult for people to sympathize, but she puts us in the situation of those characters, not only to understand their various motives, but also Seeing our own figure in them." This is a story of betrayal and redemption, and it is also a fable of father and son: in the story, as in reality, the father will disappoint the son, and the son will let the father down. Disappointment: The father's disappointment is because his expectations and imagination for the future have been lost, and the son's disappointment is because he discovered that the image of his childhood father is just his illusion. The real father is like himself, full of flaws and weaknesses. However, Juan is not only the god of conflict, he is also the god of time and change, and the god of end: in the conflict and opposition of January, at this moment, there is a surge of choice and the possibility of atonement-that is one Yue’s third face, a face that cannot be seen by us, but looks at us all the time. In the movie, when Chester was dying, he confessed to the police that he was responsible for the two deaths, and said to Rydal: "I'm sorry, I let you down." He finally completed his life's crimes. With punishment, he finally became a father; and when Rydal came to Chester's grave and buried Colette's bracelet, he finally completed the reconciliation with Chester and his father. He completed a reconciliation with himself.

October 2020 Chengdu

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Extended Reading
  • Dusty 2022-03-17 09:01:07

    Spider-Man's women all fell to death. .

  • Rashawn 2022-03-26 09:01:11

    The thief of the father issue meets the thief, the black eats the black, and the wrong step is wrong; there is no IQ contest, only two people are fighting who is more unlucky. It's still the genius Ripley's set, the story is not bad, the actors are good, but the filming is really not very special

The Two Faces of January quotes

  • Chester MacFarland: I'm sorry I disappointed you.

  • [last lines]

    Chester MacFarland: I'm sorry I disappointed you