Atom Egoyan
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Under the ironclad laws decreed by movieland, we know that cheating on a spouse leads to nothing but trouble (Fatal Attraction); snooping on a suspected philanderer will only uncover things you really didn’t want to know about (What Lies Beneath, every Lifetime movie ever); and, as shown in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, hiring a prostitute to tempt your spouse into infidelity is not such a terrific idea.
But Erin Cressida Wilson’s script merely grazes the theme, instead taking us on a “Fatal Attraction”-like detour with Chloe in the family-destroying stalker role.
It’s like we’ve fallen through the looking glass into a Lifetime TV Fatal Attraction knockoff.
“Chloe” takes that rather improbable situation as its starting point — before veering into creepy, “Fatal Attraction” territory.
Based on the terrible 2003 French film Nathalie, Chloe unspools like a limp copy of Fatal Attraction with way more sheen than substance.
Even when Chloe is all the more transforming into Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction," Seyfried remains not only immensely watchable, but also believable and sympathetic.
Atom Egoyan and his screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Fur ) are keen to impress on us how very enigmatic and mysterious the bond is between Catherine and Chloe.
Chloe is a remake of the 2004 French film Nathalie, and is the first of Mr. Egoyan’s films (The Sweet Hereafter and last year’s Adoration) that he didn’t write himself (Erin Cressida Wilson, who penned Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ode to spanking in Secretary, gets credit).
Not quite, although Erin Cressida Wilson’s (Secretary) script, based on the 2003 film Nathalie…, can’t quite manage that film’s self-possessed, quintessentially French combination of sang froid and simmering melodrama.
"Chloe" is based on a French film, adapted by screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson ("Secretary"), but it's right up Egoyan's alley as if he'd written it himself, a twisted tale of obsession and unexplained desire.
Working from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson ("Secretary"), Egoyan doesn't flinch from exploring the dark side of curiosity.
What really pushes “Chloe” from being just another failed remake of a movie that was perfectly good as it was into the realm of all-out, what-were-they-thinking? Disaster, though, is the adaptation of Fontaine’s original screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, best-known for her screenplay for the fairly overrated kinkfest “Secretary.”
(Atom Egoyan’s 1997 tragedy, The Sweet Hereafter, with its ensemble cast and explicit allusions to the Pied Piper legend, also seems a likely point of reference.)
Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
influenced by The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
Themes Visuals
The various and venerable spirits of “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Ordinary People” and “In the Bedroom” may hover over this movie in wintry setting and theme, but “Manchester by the Sea” is very much its own singular, seething creation.
Manchester By The Sea resembles Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, but Lonergan’s film has even greater humanity, a sense of humor and a precise observational mode that understands that life, in all its randomness, franticness and beauty, must continue during the grieving process, even if most movies make it seem like responsibilities and desires sleep for grief and sorrow.
He has entwined a present-day narrative with flashback sequences somewhat in the manner of Atom Egoyan’s jigsaw stories like “The Sweet Hereafter,” but with fresh, well-defined characters and a story all his own.
Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried steam up the screen in the hottest lesbian coupling since Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve got busy in Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film "The Hunger."
Soon, however, we discover Chloe is more of a lesbian Fatal Attraction than a Last Tango in Paris, a tawdry, exploitative thriller that might have been good if it had spent half as much time creating characters for whom we could feel as it did situations to catch them in various states of undress.
Like Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991), which featured Arsinée Khanjian as a censor obsessed with pornography, Censor posits that repeated viewing of proscribed material, even by someone supposedly dispassionate and employed to judge such work professionally, could create an unhealthy appetite for the very stuff they’re meant to be regulating.
In 1997 Atom Egoyan made his masterpiece “The Sweet Hereafter,” one of the best films of the decade.
There are two movies at war here: a glum, wintry character drama from the Atom Egoyan mold (say, The Sweet Hereafter or Exotica) and a very-particular-set-of-skills thriller a la Taken.
Playing a successful Toronto gynecologist—Canada’s gynecological community has apparently recovered from the havoc wreaked by Jeremy Irons’ Dead Ringers twins—Julianne Moore is first seen advising a sexually frustrated client that an orgasm is little more than muscle contractions caused by proper stimulation of the clitoris.
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020)
Directed by Lili Horvát
influenced by Exotica (1994)
One could picture it playing American theaters back in 1994 alongside Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy.
This is mostly because in its heart of hearts Chloe is a silly late 1980s or early 1990s psychosexual thriller—a kind of Sapphic variant on Fatal Attraction (1987), with a good dose of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) thrown in for good (or bad) measure.
The verdict: Begging comparisons to the work of director Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Unfaithful”) isn’t the best way for Egoyan to halt the perception that his career is floundering, but he brings enough atmosphere and finesse to “Chloe” to trick viewers into thinking there might be some depth to the film’s tawdry events.
Without revealing the details of the various anguished conversations and romps on high-end bedding that lead up to the violent climax, I can say that the biggest aesthetic influence on Chloe's finale is not David Cronenberg (the Canadian filmmaker Egoyan has cited as a mentor), but the Paul Verhoeven of Basic Instinct .
Chloe is very much in that Fatal Attraction/Basic Instinct mould, though not nearly as thrilling or erotic as its steamy predecessors.
Egoyan clearly relishes the chance to indulge in a lush visual approach which rather directly evokes his favorite film, Alfred Hitchcock's " Vertigo ."
In another universe Egoyan might have pulled off something similar with Ararat, his anguished 2002 misfire about the legacy of the Armenian Massacres.
A wonderfully overwrought score by Mychael Danna, who also composed music for "The Ice Storm," transforms "Chloe" into the kind of romance novel Ang Lee might have written, with pleasures both guilty and otherwise.
What Cohen brings to The Good Thief is the same air of beautiful fatalism he brought to Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1994).
Put it in the same category as The War Zone and The Sweet Hereafter - movies about intimate tragedies whose impact wrenches both the heart and the mind.
The girl is named Chloe and she's played by Amanda Seyfried, the second banana from Mean Girls who is slowly taking over the career Lindsay Lohan could've had.
Those of us lucky enough to have spotted her in Mean Girls or the TV show Veronica Mars have known for years that she was a talent to look out for, and she's proved it in this film, where she has to play a character who necessarily doesn't exactly have a personality, and do it in a way that suggests the actual person hiding inside the persona named "Chloe" (that may or may not be her name; we never really do find out).
It'll probably most be remembered, however, as the film in which Amanda Seyfried (" Mama Mia! ," "Mean Girls") outgrew playing the ingenue.
Chloe is as far from Karen in Mean Girls, Sophie in Mamma Mia! and Needy in Jennifer’s Body as you can get.
The verdict: Begging comparisons to the work of director Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Unfaithful”) isn’t the best way for Egoyan to halt the perception that his career is floundering, but he brings enough atmosphere and finesse to “Chloe” to trick viewers into thinking there might be some depth to the film’s tawdry events.