Chloe (2010)
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Catherine and David Stewart are a well-to-do couple living in a posh area of Toronto, but all is not well in paradise. Catherine suspects that David is cheating on her, so she hires an escort named Chloe to meet David and see if he gives in to temptation — but events spin out of control when Chloe spills the details of her torrid encounters.
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21 films that influenced Chloe
What critics say influenced Chloe
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.”
The Canada-based, Oscar-nominated director Atom Egoyan has plenty of experience with adult dramas about sex, including Exotica (1995) and Where the Truth Lies (2005), and his new Chloe -- which is a remake of the 2003 French film Nathalie -- comes with his usual brand of chilly intelligence and maturity.
In films great ("Exotica") and flawed but watchable ("Where The Truth Lies"), Egoyan isn't afraid to "go there," whether it's depicting sex on-screen, or more daringly, how people really think about sex on-screen.
"Chloe," like his great film " Exotica " (1994), is about sexual attraction confused by financial arrangements.
When that project had been announced, many questioned why Egoyan, who had made a name for himself with such enigmatic and emotionally devastating dramas as “Exotica” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” would want to invest his time and talent in bringing a roman a clef novel from Rupert Holmes, best known for penning the immortal “The Pina Colada Song,” to the big screen and after getting a load of the always turgid and rarely tumescent results, they were still wondering.
With his work on “Exotica” and “Where the Truth Lies,” Egoyan has danced on the sticky floors of sexual fixation before, yet “Chloe” is his most accessible stab at the genre (in fact, the picture is a remake of a 2003 French film).
Few filmmakers have the gift of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian director of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, of establishing a mood so supercharged that your internals combust.
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."
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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.
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.
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.
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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 ."