Chloe wants to be an erotic thriller. At least, that’s what I think it aims to be. It’s difficult to know for sure, what with its eroticism steeped in so much fussy pretensions. The movie is particularly disappointing coming from Atom Egoyan, the director behind the critically acclaimed Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Those films were complex explorations of sexuality and morality, but Chloe is just a muddle.
Our story concerns an affluent couple whose marriage has grown as chilly as the film’s Toronto setting. David (Liam Neeson) is a college music professor who is curiously chummy with his female students. His wife, Catherine (Julianne Moore), is a successful gynecologist who suspects her husband is up to more than innocent flirtation.
Her fears appear confirmed when she puts on a surprise birthday party for him. David, who has been out of town for a lecture, misses his flight back home. The next morning, Catherine finds an incriminating text and photo on his mobile phone.
Shortly thereafter, a chance meeting in a restaurant bathroom introduces Catherine to a mysterious young prostitute named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried). In the first of several plot contrivances, Catherine hires the call girl to test David’s fidelity.
Chloe takes the assignment and dutifully reports back that David was easy to seduce. The revelation devastates Catherine, but she also finds it surprisingly arousing. She directs Chloe to continue the trysts and report back to her in lurid detail. It becomes clear that the relationship between Chloe and Catherine is decidedly more complicated, and intimate, than that of temptress and victimized wife.
The notion of parallel affairs – one carnal, the other verbal and vicarious – is an interesting one, and for a while Chloe hums along with intrigue. But then a curious thing happens: Egoyan and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, in adapting the 2003 French-language film Nathalie…, barrel into eye-rolling absurdity.
Fiction always has a fair amount of contrivance and manipulation that strains credibility, but Chloe does more stretching than hot yoga. Chloe herself comes off as little more than a plot device to move along reason-defying plot twists.
Not that there isn’t some crass fun to be had in this mess. Chloe’s final third is so outrageous, so risible, it approaches high camp. What else can you say about a flick in which a woman has a literal orgasm – a shoegasm™, if you will – by glimpsing a closet full of pricey footwear? That’s funny stuff, but you have the impression that Chloe’s filmmakers don’t get the joke.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 