Two salient facts may be noted about Chloe. It’s the film Liam Neeson was making when he lost his wife Natasha Richardson in a skiing accident; and it’s the new film by Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Unfortunately, both those facts are largely irrelevant. The first is irrelevant because, even though the film’s schedule was shuffled to accommodate Neeson’s grief, there’s no indication that the plot or his own role changed as a result. The second is irrelevant simply because, these days, hardly anyone knows who Egoyan is.
It wasn’t always thus. In the mid-to-late 90s, the ethnic-Armenian auteur was quite a ‘name’ director – not to the mass audience, but (for instance) in the way Almodovar is now. His films were often sexy, but also repressed; they were keenly aware that keeping sex at arm’s length – whether it was watching pornography, as in The Adjuster (1991), or the look-but-don’t-touch context of a strip club, as in Exotica (1994) – can be almost as arousing as actually doing it. Egoyan also made good use of Sarah Polley, the pale, blonde teenage actress known from TV’s Road to Avonlea.
Both these trademarks recur in Chloe, which is why the new film is best appreciated by fans of the old ones; alas, Egoyan seems to have become cruder and more obvious in the years since. “This is a sexy situation,” says someone in Chloe, and so it is: sex is everywhere in this movie – but always at arm’s length, mostly witnessed by Catherine (Julianne Moore) at one remove from the act itself. Her teenage son is having it off with his girlfriend; a middle-aged friend is constantly pawing his much younger consort; other friends talk about Don Juan and his many lovers; one of Catherine’s patients (she’s a psychiatrist) talks about orgasms, which Catherine dismisses as a series of muscle spasms. There’s “nothing mysterious” about the act of sex, she says reassuringly.
She’s wrong, of course – or rather, she’s both right and wrong. She’s right (for what it’s worth) about the muscle spasms. But one of Egoyan’s main insights as a director is that the ways in which sex is perceived – the weight of mystery it assumes in people’s psyche – are far more important than the act itself. Chloe st
Seyfried (the daughter in Mamma Mia!) is pale, young and blonde, with big green eyes. In short, she looks a lot like Sarah Polley, and Egoyan clearly wants to use her like he used Polley in his 90s films, as a fount of youthful wisdom, kindness – “I try to find something to love in everybody” – and dangerous idealism. She does well in the early scenes, when the camera settles on her big eyes and long lingering looks, but then Chloe st
Still, it’s refreshing to find a film that takes sex as its subject, instead of treating it with the usual adolescent prurience. Like real people, characters in Chloe use sex as a weapon: Chloe uses sex (with David) as a way of getting closer to Catherine while Catherine uses sex (with Chloe) as a way of getting closer to David, trying to feel what he felt. Maybe it’s a consequence of watching infantile films at the multiplex week after week, but I did appreciate the sophistication.
The problem isn’t Egoyan’s feel for human behaviour, it’s what he does with it. Simply put, his films used to be mysterious, whereas this one is obvious. The final-act twist is transparent, the emotional currents easily traceable. The architecture and décor – Catherine’s glass house, one wall dominated by a framed photo of herself with her son as a little boy – are heavily symbolic. Above all, though the portrait of a stale marriage has some felicities (Catherine’s birthday present to her husband is an impersonal bottle of Scotch), Chloe herself is an abstraction at best, a cheap seductress at worst. “I can become your dream, then disappear,” she says, describing her job to a customer. Trouble is, she never appears very clearly in the first place.
