Who can you believe anything these days?

The investment advisor?

The health minister?

Your own children?

It is better not to believe Mr. Viggo Mortensen at all;

he is far too good an actor for the substance of every character he plays not to be threatened by his talent and craft, because he no longer knows who he is and what he believes to be true, what his playing style, of course.

It's best if someone just plays some incredibly bold liar, then the audience can identify with the respective character better.

After all, we all lie all day just to survive, because people constantly want, have to and are allowed to know something about us that doesn't concern them;

it's called the information society.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Maria Wiesner

Style Coordinator.

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The loss of trust that inevitably results from this situation has a lot of funny social consequences.

Questions of almost philosophical depth are relevant to everyday life: What do you actually get for the money if nobody at the central bank buys what they say, and what is the value of an education system that, in addition to public institutions, also provides mastery knowledge for the thicker purses or private lessons according to ideological quirks?

Before the general lack of credibility expands endlessly, it is worth taking a look at its most compact and intimate narrative form: the love story between three people who lie not only to each other, but also to themselves.

So that the stakes in this game are not too low, it is best to kill right away.

the image of society,

While the so-called Western image of man officially assumes (or only claims, but does not believe, i.e. lies) that we are rational beings who are only shaken up by a lapse every now and then, Ms. Highsmith assumed the opposite: Our brains, she said, are actually in place permanently in the intoxication of greed, lust, envy, hatred or even total hubris, sometimes simultaneously, and reason only happens to us occasionally, by mistake.

Accordingly, Hossein Amini's beautiful, evil film "The Two Faces of January" (2014), based on Highsmith's novel of the same name, is an hour-and-a-half intoxication compressed by the constraints of inevitable extreme situations, against which the half- to quarter-reasonable plans of the three people unsuccessfully struggle it works (and of course, in none of the three cases does their lie come close to what they want).

The film takes place in Greece and Crete in the early 1960s, where Oscar Issac meets Rydal Keener, a young American exile, tourist guide and occasional fraudster, Viggo Mortensen, who plays the drunken ex-soldier Chester MacFarland and has Kirsten Dunst as his wife Colette .

The couple seems as wealthy as they are unstable, apparently drifting across the old continent in a lazy drift, but they have a secret from the world.

From this secret, which in itself is just manageable on a human scale, a larger one soon splits off, which the husband has to hide from the wife, while the latter soon acquires another one that concerns her relationship with the charming exile, who in turn tries to trick both MacFarlands, but ends up badly fooling himself.

So everything is just like in real life, especially in the hair-raising vita of the author of the literary original, where destructive love triangles, lies and meanness alternated to the bitter end - the world has every reason to welcome the comparatively harmless career choice of this extraordinary woman;

I can't imagine what she would have done if, instead of spending at least part of her earthly life writing about nefarious deeds, she could have used the necessary time to commit deeds of her own, which would certainly have been worse than the ones she was actually given accused.

We are showing "The Two Faces of January" this Tuesday at the seventh "FAZ Film Evening".

How you can take part in the FAZ film evening

The FAZ film evening format, which we developed in cooperation with the streaming service Pantaflix, is regularly offered to an audience with an FAZ subscription.

If you don't already have a subscription, you can subscribe here.

Each evening begins with a brief introduction to the film selected by the editors.

With the start of the film evening on Tuesday, December 6, 2022, at 7 p.m., the selected film will be available to subscribers free of charge (before that, it can only be borrowed for a fee, but this limit will be automatically lifted for FAZ subscribers at the start of the event.) After the short introduction to the film, some browsers may need to refresh this page to start the stream.

Questions or requests to speak for the subsequent discussion can be shared after registering on FAZ.NET using the comment function.

After each screening, Dietmar Dath and Maria Wiesner from the editorial department have a discussion with the audience and with each other.

This is intended to create a space for the exchange of ideas that goes beyond the usual critical register (e.g. a review) in search of connections and judgments that do justice to the richness of the feature film format.