Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2010)

[John Cope]

A wonderful collection of interview clips with Egoyan via Roger Ebert. Has anyone here seen Chloe yet? I know thrityframesasecond was planning to but we never got any follow up on that. Also, what's the word on the film it's based on, Anne Fontaine's Nathalie...? I recorded it off IFC awhile back but never got around to watching it. I'm hoping there are shades of Brisseau to it but I suppose that's asking too much.

[Matt]

I saw the trailer for this in front of A Prophet. I want to give Egoyan (and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, who also adapted Secretary) the benefit of the doubt, but doesn't the erotic thriller genre just feel all wrong for our times? This movie looks like it came straight out of the mid-90s. You'd think Julianne Moore would have had enough of this after Body of Evidence (and didn't Liam Neeson just make this film?), but there must be something in the story that drew all of these talented people to it.

[cinemartin]

It seems like the same plot as Extract. Just taken to another extreme.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I watched it at the London Film Festival. Did I never report back?

I've never seen Nathalie incidentally but I'm not sure the plot developments are ever that much of a surprise anyway. From the Q&A and what I've read, Egoyan was approached by Reitman - it's not his own project, returning more to the director for hire mode of Where the Truth Lies. It's not anything like a great Egoyan film, but it's diverting in its own way. It's clearly the work of a talented film maker even if there's a lack of real substance. Many have written it off as a Fatal Attraction style genre piece but I think that does it a little disservice. Seyfried, an actress I only know from Mean Girls, is actually pretty good in a role that's a mass of contradictions. I'd probably recommend it to Egoyan fans only, I suppose.

[Jeff]

Finally saw this today. Overall, it was probably my least favorite Egoyan. I can really only recommend the very good performances from Neeson and Moore, and a surprisingly solid turn by Seyfried. The lame plot twists manage to be both predictable and absurd, and it does indeed play like a lost remnant of the 90s erotic thriller genre. There isn't any really substance behind the relatively tame Cinemax style eroticism, though I could see that Egoyan was trying to explore some of the same themes as Eyes Wide Shut. I briefly thought it might turn interesting in the end, until a ridiculous Deus ex machina brought the thing to a screeching halt. The couple at the center of the film were supposed to be wealthy. If so, how come

Spoiler

their large plate glass windows were seemingly attached to the house with Velcro?

Is this typical for Canada?

[willoneill]

Spoiler

their large plate glass windows were seemingly attached to the house with Velcro?

Is this typical for Canada?

No, that wouldn't meet most standards or building codes. Makes for a fancy shot, though.

[John Cope]

Well, it looks like I'm going to be in the minority on this. I saw it last week and was extremely impressed with it, far more so than I ever expected to be and in all honesty feel like I'm still processing it. I would, however, be willing to go so far as to say that I think it may be the best thing Egoyan's done since Exotica (save for the Cannes short and the unseen-by-me Citadel). I realize this may come across as excessively lavish praise but I'll expand on it a bit in order to explain myself better.

The main thing that hits me about this one and the foundation for my strong response to it is the fact that first and foremost here Egoyan simply delivers a very well made film from a purely formal, architectonic perspective. This is a finely tuned piece, superbly well observed and attentive to detail. But it's detail of a seemingly more prosaic nature than is usually the case with Egoyan. The extraordinary, refreshing aspect to Chloe exists in its director's submission to form and function. In this it resembles Cronenberg's recent, similar experiments in genre.

Egoyan has had a real tendency to get in his own way, and I say that as a great admirer of his work. Even at its weakest (Where the Truth Lies, for instance) it's still resolutely admirable as it always aspires to so much intellectually. But there is little doubt that this has been a double edged sword for awhile now. Ararat is, of course, the best example of this tendency and the mixed results of messiness and over-reach. But more to the point in respect to Chloe are the numerous examples of genre type films heavily encumbered by the weight of those self same intellectual ambitions. They are not, on the whole, well integrated works I mean. Felicia's Journey gets overly distracted by taking apart the nuances of its antagonist's psychology and forgets how to maintain a meaningful tension, which presumably is also its goal. The attention to nuance in that case does not enhance the narrative by complicating it and our response to its familiar design but rather obstructs and clutters, ultimately defuses through diffusion, by letting all the air out while it fixates on singular obsessions. Adoration is actually a strong picture for the most part and a return to form of a sort but Egoyan's mishandling of the central technology motif suggested that he could not quite go home again, could not approach those same old themes with the precision of a developed stance; he was simply unwilling or unable to commit to any particular point of view for very long and that produced a resultant lack of clarity. The fact that much of the rest of that picture worked, however, points to what is accomplished in Chloe and why.

It's certainly true that this is an unapologetic erotic thriller of a type we have seen before, yes, complete with what are, I suppose, predictable twists. But the difference is in the way those details are handled and in the fact that whether they are predicatble matters little. But what is wondrous here is the way in which Egoyan does not seek to "salvage" this material as though he feels a need to elevate its pedigree or ennoble it (this was how Exotica was seen by some and that was an incorrect reading as it was never interested in being an erotic thriller to begin with--those elements that most closely resemble that or call it to mind are only vehicles for expression, means toward an end; they are not indulged or given over to). It is only when he has done this--sought to make these familiar forms more respectable--that he has failed as they do not need to be made respectable. With Chloe he adapts the script first and adheres to certain conventions without qualification or any distancing affectations. Egoyan is helped by being released from some of his usual associations: the script is by someone else, the actors are not from his stable (I didn't recognize even a bit player from any of his other films). Mychael Danna returns as his reliable composer, however, and perhaps this is because he understands what Egoyan is after; his exquisite score here recalls elements of John Berry and erotic thriller era Jerry Goldsmith but spliced through with his own distinctive ambient origins, the presence of an additional texture in synchronicity.

The film's performances are great and they are all sketched with effective psychological acuity without tipping the scales into self-absorption. The quality of these performaces is critical as, without them, nothing Egoyan or his venerable dp Paul Sarossy can do will make this material work as erotic. But it is erotic and that is a tribute to those performances which so fully match Egoyan's atmosphere and tone; but they also enrich and deepen that surface upon which, no doubt, Egoyan is primarily focused. The erotic thriller is a perfect vehicle for the kind of exploration of surfaces that he seems intent on here and that exploration can be done concomitant with fulfilling existing, established genre obligations. The fact that it does satisfy on that surface level is a greater success than it seems as it feeds back into Egoyan's intentions.Those intentions are what undergird the picture, seep through and define its essence.

Egoyan's contribution here is in his consideration of the fantasy elements of his narrative, the way they conflict and collide, the way they determine the possible truths of this world. He doesn't force that consideration onto the material as it stands but lets it come out in the detail. It's there in every glistening frame (has there ever been a more superficially beautiful Egoyan film?). It's most certainly there in the set design which emphasizes the high artifice of the home Neeson and Moore share. That home is more than just a product of wealth and privilege, it's a lavish testament to a desire for a meaningful aesthetic life that can't get beyond rigorous ornamentation. And the reason it can't, of course, is that it doesn't believe in what it aspires to enough to do so.

This implicit, unacknowledged aspect to the characters (particularly Moore's character Catherine whom we spend the most time with) as it is articulated in their living spaces also comes out in their professional demeanor, their social roles and orientation. Catherine is a medical doctor and is introduced to us in a scene at her office as she performs a gynecological exam on a young woman who confesses to an inability to experience orgasm. Catherine makes a point of firmly insisting on the primacy of the mechanics of it all, the simple bio-based reality of orgasm inducement and sends her home with some literature. This insistence on demystification is a solid, workable definition of Catherine's general identity and establishing it is the point of the scene. It clarifies why the rest of the narrative happens at all and why it has to happen the way it does.

Seyfried is gorgeous as expected but it's her contradictory nature that fascinates and, once again, without the film itself fixating unduly on these things and emphasizing their importance. She is not so much a sex worker here as a product of fantastical imagination, an object of imaginative projection and a perpetuator of same. The scene in which she attempts to seduce the son of Moore and Neeson with a "real" CD as opposed to the virtual variety is partially a deceptive technique, of course, but it is the fact that that is not all it is that gives it weight as a moment of substance; for though this is, in some ways, an obvious enough metaphor for who Chloe herself is and what she offers it isn't simple at all if one actually takes the correlation seriously and considers to what degree Chloe herself can afford to believe in it, what it would mean for her if she does. Her eventual fate is foreshadowed expertly here. And I'm not even doing proper justice to the whole matter of body image and sex based desire the movie investigates so adroitly, with such incredible grace and dexterity.

Still, it is in that tension between notions of rationalism and fantasy Egoyan locates his picture's purpose. These notions are held by characters who have only a hazy idea of their implications themselves but they inform their interactions and indicate limits to their capacities for vision and understanding. The role of fantasy as an often unacknowledged medium for realizing desire or embodying desire with potency or palpable force is what lies behind the whole dynamic between Moore and Seyfried and is what makes the vagaries of that relationship rich and compelling.

The ending then takes on further resonance too as an indicator of what happens when confusion or even Egoyan-esque questioning fatally complicates such a dynamic (and this is nice too as it unintentionally works as critique of Egoyan's own usual methodological approach). It ultimately does not matter much if Chloe's feelings for Catherine are "real" or the product of a confusion or a derangement because whatever the case they most certainly illustrate a confusion on the level of social roleplaying, an implicit violation of unstated but understood norms. Chloe's affections cross the line or, perhaps it could be said more accurately, muddy the line of clear commodity exchange, which is how this society understands and controls the disruptive force and radically transformative potentiality of fantasy. Catherine had earlier attempted to buy Chloe off with money and this was as much an instance of her own attempt to wrest back the primacy of rationalism as it was an attempt to divest herself of a scary stalker. It could be said that at the end Moore represents the dominant force of pure commerce reasserting the proper limits for an exchange based comprehension of fantasy, relegating it to a position of diminished importance or effect, rendering it impotent really. None of this makes Catherine's own feelings for her husband or Chloe any less genuine. The confusion and tension, the getting-lostness of it all, allows these seemingly antithetical positions to co-exist, though not harmoniously. And this is why the last shot is so breathtaking; because it implies so much of this sort: that Catherine maintains a sentimental attachment, a remnant of fantastically based and expressed desire, but that maintaining an artifact of Chloe's in such sublimated form also functions as a triumphalistic gesture over the dangerous allure she represents.

Finally, I would argue it is Egoyan's commitment to surface clarity that makes this film such a great, compelling one. He has the confidence to trust that his innate, guiding thematic interests and aesthetic strategies will emerge and that they will implicitly give shape and weight to otherwise familiar conventions and proceedings.