I would love to see someone do the white-trash version of Chloe and make a movie about some waitress who becomes convinced her trucker husband is cheating on her and hires a teenage streetwalker to seduce him in order to confirm her suspicions — only to have the streetwalker fall in love with her instead. It would still be a ridiculous, lurid plot, but at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the wintry cinematography and the scenes shot in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the classical piano concerts and the loving shots of fancy hotel bedsheets and expensive hosiery and the tasteful architecture with all the glass walls, and the pretentious references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni and ohmigod all the shots of mirror reflections inside mirror reflections that director Atom Egoyan fills this movie up with, as if to convince us (and maybe himself) that this movie is some kind of classy meditation on desire instead of the overblown episode of Red Shoe Diaries that it plainly is. I’m going to call upon all of my fellow Canadian cinephiles here and ask them, now that we've all done our patriotic duty and patiently sat through the likes of Ararat, Where the Truth Lies, and now Chloe, if it’s about time we acknowledged that Atom Egoyan has become the Canuck equivalent of Woody Allen: a once-great director with a taste for attractive young starlets now in the middle of a dismaying creative slump. Last year’s Adoration was Egoyan’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a film that got enthusiastic reviews largely out of relief that it wasn’t terrible. Or maybe Chloe is Egoyan’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in that its main point of interest is a lesbian makeout scene between a prestigious older actress and a luscious young starlet — at least in Chloe, Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore actually get naked.
Poor Julianne Moore has been photographed here to look as pale and freckly and washed-out as possible, all the better to contrast with the creamy-skinned, big-eyed, Vargas-girl lusciousness of Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried does a nice job of the silent moments in which she primps in front of the mirror, coolly expertly evaluating her own desirability, but I don’t know if any actress could make this cryptic character seem like anything more than a screenwriter’s construct — part Jane Fonda in Klute, part Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. There’s a pretty funny joke in the way that (spoiler alert!) Seyfried winds up seducing everybody in this family except the very person she’s been hired to sleep with, but I’m not sure Egoyan sees it as funny — I think he sees it as a sad and tragic irony, an emblem of how, in this alienating modern world of ours, we all have a way of misplacing our desires.
Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson (who plays the husband caught in the middle between Moore and Seyfried) are experience enough screen presences to give this material a certain feeling of solidity, but nothing on view in Chloe feels remotely like convincing human behaviour. This may sound like a petty observation, but two of Chloe’s early scenes (one set in Neeson’s classroom and another at a birthday party) really do feature some of the worst-directed extras I’ve seen in a movie in a long time — it’s enough to make you wonder if Egoyan’s chilly directorial style is less an artistic choice than simply a way of covering up for an inability to get his actors to behave naturally in the first place. The most memorable performances in Chloe may well be given by Amanda Seyfried’s two winter coats, one a cream-coloured affair with an eye-catching black leaf-and-vine pattern wrapping around it, the other a sort of upscale version of the kind of flouncy, fuzzy, ’70s-hippie things that Kate Hudson wore in Almost Famous. No woman who’s seen Chloe would want to hire Amanda Seyfried as an escort, but I bet plenty would love to make her their personal shopper.
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