Friday, March 26, 2010

Chloe


There are all kinds of ways to make a movie and Chloe resembles an odd amalgamation of the select pulse of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan and the 1970s Japanese "roman porno" movement. Chloe is a movie about an upper class Toronto couple with typical marital problems; he's distant and aloof and she's convinced he's having an affair.
Julianne Moore, playing a gynecologist with a penchant for high heels, hires young prostie Amanda Seyfried to seduce her husband, Liam Neeson (quite professorial lecturing on opera). As events unfold Moore and Seyfried have more of a thing going that Seyfried and Neeson. The thing about girl on girl titillation is that it has an undeniable place in cinema when used within other genres. Such plot turns work in Bound (crime noir fu) and The Hunger (vampire fu) or Mulholland Drive (horror fu) and even Wild Things although I'm not sure what kind of fu that's supposed to be, By the third act Seyfriend is revealed to be a kind of stalker and the family, or the audience depending on your patience, may be in peril.
Egoyan has never been a mainstream director and his films only received a boost in viewership above his cult audience with a handful of 90s movies that were distributed and cleverly marketed by Miramax or Fine Line (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter). Chloe's certainly easy to watch but dissolves from memory soon after unwinding. If you want to witness Egoyan in full tilt mode you should see his 2005 Where the Truth Lies. Chloe, playing exclusively at the downtown Angelika, just doesn't have the conviction to sustain its melodrama.

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