WHEN A GREAT filmmaker, whose work has never really pleased the masses, tries to do something more popular, the director gets more credit if he does something with blood in it than if he makes erotica. Specifically, if Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, The Adjuster) had made up for the poor box-office performance of his recent work with a serial-killer movie instead of Chloe, he would probably get more respect.
Chloe is apparently work for hire, a remake of 2003’s Nathalie … by Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel, The Girl From Monaco). In the original, Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu played the older married couple—Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson fit those two silhouettes nicely for Agoyan.
The plot is completely absurd, but the actors convince you that it can be played seriously. A straight-laced Toronto gynecologist, Catherine (Moore), suspects that her husband is unfaithful. The husband, David (Neeson), is a music professor, significantly introduced to us as he lectures on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. An early moment of awkwardness intrudes here: a student asks David from the middle of the lecture hall if he wants to go out for a drink. Clearly, the scenes should have been split into two setups. Who asks a professor a question like that in the middle of a lecture? Cost-effectiveness aside, the point is made. David is perhaps too available to his little students.
Catherine meets a very expensive-looking prostitute, Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), in the bathroom of a fancy hotel. The physician decides to hire the sex worker to seduce her husband to see if he can be had. In her opening monologue, Chloe explains herself as a person who is good with words. She later says something believable about how she functions—she finds something to love in the most unlovable. Egoyan bypasses the tiresome reasons why Chloe chose the life; in this economy, everyone feels like a prostitute, anyway.
Chloe takes the case. Reporting to Catherine at cafes like a secret agent, the young girl comes back with stories of everything that she and David did together. The stories affect Catherine on a level she hadn’t expected. This lewd Scheherazade hooks her audience; Catherine continues to hire her, and that’s when the paid-for companion gets out of control.
Egoyan celebrates Seyfried’s rare beauty—the slantendicular emerald eyes, the exotically oval shape of her head. We get both the golden side and the brassy side of Seyfried, the glow and the calculation. Here is Florentine beauty and a bit of Warner Bros. 1933. Egoyan lets Seyfried go large in the last scenes, and the young actress is up to it.
Despite the commerciality, Chloe is clearly an Egoyan film—mysterious, fearless and darkly funny about the marriage. The director is obsessed with the inability to record truth, knowing that no matter what the technology, stories are reflections of reflections. It’s a motif he highlights by showing us Chloe in cheval glasses and bathroom mirrors. His unease about the intrusiveness of electronic surveillance makes Chloe count as satire. (Chloe has the best joke about Skype I’ve seen in a movie.)
The bit-by-bit way David succumbs (or seems to)—with reluctance, erectile dysfunction and fear of going back to work with soiled clothes—suggests that enough time has passed to turn the Bill Clinton scandal into art. Egoyan’s staging matches instances of strong explicitness with implicitness. One Chloe/David rendezvous takes place at Allen Gardens, a Victorian tropical plant conservatory. The meet is shot through window panes: it’s a way of parsing the lovers, showing David’s orgasm by the twitch of his arm.
On a more popular level, Chloe rehabilitates the Skinemax erotic thriller. It also gives Moore something to sink her fine teeth into: she has the best ability to contain choked down emotions of any actress outside of Japan. Louis Malle likened Moore to Jeanne Moreau as a ravaged screen goddess. She’s too civilized in a rose-red gown in a party scene; later, she gets more feral, emitting a half-gasp, half sob as she hears the bad news about her husband.
I’m expecting a little starchy condemnation of Chloe as a male fantasy—though perhaps there are some women who could handle all the trysting. First, Chloe is based on a film made by a woman. Second, neither of the two female directors Seyfried has worked for, Diablo Cody and Phyllida Lloyd, gave the actress so much of a chance to express her feminine force. Besides, we should all get some slack in light of Kathryn Bigelow’s celebrated victory in the realm of making a more traditional kind of male fantasy: the war picture.
There will be women who understand Chloe‘s argument that you can wring more eroticism out of aggression—out of a breached territorial imperative—than you can out of white wine, candles and an unlimited charge card. Having said that, Chloe looks rich and classy: Egoyan frames the action with the glum chic of Toronto’s hip restaurants (mausoleums against the cold), a tiny Edwardian midtown hotel just made for a quick one and the polished wooden box of mirrors Catherine and David live in. Chloe‘s eroticism and implicit satire of the sweet life rival the unfaithful wife’s monologue in Godard’s classic Weekend.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
CHLOE (R; 96 min.), directed by Atom Egoyan, written by Erin Cressida Wilson, photographed by Paul Sarossy and starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried, opens March 26.
