Chloe - Tra seduzione e inganno

Chloe is a 2009 erotic thriller film directed by Atom Egoyan, a remake of the 2003 French film Nathalie.... It stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Its screenplay was written by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the earlier French film, written by Anne Fontaine.

Catherine (Moore) hires Chloe (Seyfried), an escort, to test her husband's (Neeson) loyalty towards her. However, Chloe falls in love with Catherine and the two women get intimate, which complicates their lives.

Chloe starts off as an intriguing psychological drama - and then begins to veer off into B-movie territory, although Egoyan packs in enough wisdom about the slow erosion of relationships, about aging, about female desire, to make the film utterly worthwhile. Moore and Seyfried provide the film with an intense breath of authenticity guaranteeing you feel the pain inflicted upon their characters by the plot's extreme circumstances.

The script's feminine perspective helps elevate the film from Egoyan's usual sexy (but satisfying) thriller into something a tad more insightful. The films seductive aesthetic is both distancing and, largely on the strength of Moore's translucent performance and Seyfried's boldness, forcibly intimate.

The film may be predictable and a little messy when it comes to the story-telling but Moore and Seyfried deliver enough hot chemistry to keep an audience's interest until the final moments. Between the strong acting, camera work, the subtle yet powerful score and a compelling story that lures us immediately, Chloe is ultimately a recommended watch.

If anyone was suited for remaking the French film Nathalie, it was Atom Egoyan, whose deeply twisted and occasionally perverse studies of sexuality, expressed through an apparently cold directorial eye, go hand in hand with a script that emphasized words over images (though there is a bit more flesh in the English-language transition). Hence the rather brilliant Chloe, whose prime accomplishment lies in its being less showy and pretentious than the director's previous foray into erotic secrets, the ambitious Where the Truth Lies.

Set in Egoyan's home town of Toronto, Chloe tells the story of the eponymous call girl (Amanda Seyfried) who is hired by gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) when the latter starts to suspect her husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair. Chloe's job is to casually approach him and see if he falls for her charm, thus indicating his propensity for adultery. However, as the girl's reports get more and more graphic, Catherine realizes she has put herself in an awkward position, one that it will be difficult to get out of.

A fascinating hybrid between psychological drama and erotic thriller (there's a vague hint of Fatal Attraction throughout the movie), Chloe is a rarity due to its attempt to analyze sex and its consequences without necessarily resorting to openly titillating imagery (a characteristic Egoyan shares with another Canadian maestro, David Cronenberg). The only downside of this approach is the same flaw that was much more evident in Where the Truth Lies, namely a deliberately slow pace that affects the thriller aspects but enhances the emotional poignancy, something that comes off as a paradox given the seemingly cold subject matter.

Furthermore, there is no coldness to be found in the carefully crafted performances: Neeson and Moore play the troubled couple with conviction, especially when things start getting more complicated (Moore's suspicious wife is a tour de force turn that should have received some award recognition), but the heart of the film lies, quite predictably, in Seyfried's hands, and she rises to the challenge by proving that she can do Big Love-style quality work on the big screen, embodying a complex, intriguing character light years away from her roles in Mamma Mia! and Mean Girls.

Overall, Chloe is a very good movie: sexy without being gratuitous, psychological without getting pompous and, like its title character, delightfully surprising.

The Atom Egoyan behind Chloe is not the auteur behind films like Erotica and The Sweet Hereafter, but he weaves it in the right direction, and the end result may be his most erotic film yet. Ergo, Chloe feels like enough of an Egoyan film for me to argue that going commercial is not something that will degrade the quality of his work, (although I can't say much for Where the Truth Lies.)

Dr. Catherine Stewart suspects her husband is cheating on her, so she hires a local prostitute to seduce him, and report back with news. The things that Chloe has to say really turn on Dr. Stewart, and the two women start to fall for each other. But when Catherine decides it is time to pull the plug, Chloe isn't so eager to go away.

Chloe grows increasingly eerie, and profound, which draws you in, but in the last twenty minutes, it comes close to falling apart. The picture benefits greatly from by Paul Sarossy's cinematography featuring nuances of harsh light and warm colour tones, that highlight all the interiors. What we have here a classy looking B-movie. It is intriguing but not great art.

This film reminded me of the 90's wave of erotic thrillers. It's got all the elements, including a healthy dose of softcore sex scenes which surprised me because Amanda Seyfried has such an endearing, innocent look about her. But she's such a good actress though that this doesn't prevent her from convincingly playing the role of seductive call girl Chloe. Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a gynecologist who suspects her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair with one of his students. While at work Catherine observes Chloe entering and exiting hotels with several men so she can make a pretty good guess at Chloe's profession. Catherine decides to use Chloe as bait to see if her husband would submit to the temptation of an affair with Chloe.

And even though that is the basic storyline, there is so much more that is left unsaid; things Catherine thinks she knows but doesn't know about her husband, things Chloe knows about Catherine that Catherine herself doesn't even know; and in the middle of it all, the viewer who finds out we didn't know much at all about it all. The audience is pretty much kept in the dark as to what is really going on with Chloe until one small scene that immediately switches the direction of the movie. It's not one of those hokey melodramatic twists, but will definitely have you playing back the entire movie in your mind because it sheds everything in a new light. Chloe brags at the beginning of the film, in a voice-over narration, that she has the gift of intuiting what people want and need without it being said. She can be all things to all people. And unfortunately for Julianne Moore's character, Chloe is exactly right....just not in the way that you might initially think she is.

What makes this movie good is that it has layers. Just as in real life, people are inevitably much different than what they appear to be on the surface. In a lesser film, the characters and plot would be one-dimensional and by far less interesting.

Thinking about film and how it works is made easier when you have two films that in some way are similar.

Here we had an original French film that was really quite effective. It powerfully gave us the inner dance of two conflicting souls of the performance of Woman. It was delicate, took fewer risks than we would allow, but impressed by its structure and intent.

Now it is transferred to the English language, a transition that usually and unnecessarily dulls the edges. The filmmaker is Atom Egoyan, who has made at least one essential film. I should say "director" rather than filmmaker because this has none of his precise confusion, none of his danger. He clearly is a director for hire, with someone else having commissioned a compete rewrite.

We still have two women and a husband. We still have fragments of the situation. But the whole thing is restructured. We no longer have an inner exploration, puzzlement, self- negotiation. We no longer explore humanness. Now it is all external. These really are two competing women in a traditional thriller model. Instead of allowing the structural drift into internal issues, we now have a son who plays an essential role, establishing an external observer.

This is a mess. The writer previously did well in being and writing a tortured woman. For some reason, the producers thought that was what "Nathalie" needed. Gosh, what a bad calculation! And that's with Julianne Moore, who could have made the original into life- altering art.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.