Chloe is a tough one to pin down, but it's an interesting, complicated
presentation. If I were to describe the narrative for you meticulously,
which I will not, you would conclude that the plot is too contrived, like
one of those many "erotic thrillers" that came out in the 80s and 90s
after Body Heat and Basic Instinct made a few bucks. There would be some
accuracy in that assumption, but you will almost never get that impression
while watching the movie, at least not until the final two or three
minutes, when you might groan a bit. Before that, however, the film
delivers its plot twists in such a sensible way that you can believe them
completely. The characters are so complex and credible, and are performed
so well, that you can believe you are watching real events happening to
real people, even if a detailed plot synopsis would not reflect that on
paper.
A 50ish wife decides that her handsome, professorial husband is
probably cheating on her. She is a doctor and can diagnose the symptoms of
an affair. She sees that young women are attracted to her man. She sees
that he likes to flirt with them. She sees that he seems to establish a
real intimacy with his students. She catches him in a lie or two. She
knows that their own sexual flame has been nearly extinguished. These
clues add up to more than enough evidence to drive her to dramatic action.
She hires a gorgeous call girl to tempt her man and report the results.
That's just the jumping-off point, but it's where I have to stop my
description because things get very complicated very quickly and our
assumptions about the characters are not always correct. They surprise us
with motivations both overt and secret. They are not manipulating one
another for money or sport, but to find something they long for, even if
they are not quite sure what that might be. Their true passions sometimes
remain ambiguous to us for many reasons, not the least of which is that
they themselves do not understand them. Of course, as in any thriller,
their words and actions do not always mesh. This film is a thriller of
sorts, but it's not just a thriller. It was directed by Atom Egoyan, and
he's always digging deeper than would the director of a popcorn film. In a
true genre thriller we in the audience are deceived because the characters
are lying to one another, or because the director is simply misleading us
as part of the entertainment. In this film we may be misled by the words
of the characters, but the underlying reason for the dissonance tends to
be both anfractuous and oblique. The characters may be lying to one
another, or they may be lying to themselves, or they may be surprising
themselves. It may even be true that they are lying to one another, and we
know it, but that the lies have a very different significance from that
which we first presume.
All of that verbiage can be boiled down to the fact that I enjoyed the
film. The reviews were mixed and the critics who disliked it did so for a
lot of the same reasons that made me like it. For example: "A
serious misstep...treating what is actually a lurid story as though it
were a piece of high art." I think that criticism applies better to some
of Egoyan's other films. In Where the Truth Lies, he managed to turn a
really juicy and light thriller into a hand-wringing drama by taking the
whole thing too seriously, but I don't think he did that here. I think he
did lift the erotic thriller genre into something resembling high art, and
... well ... I like that. I think it's the closest Egoyan has come in this
millennium to fulfilling the great promise he showed in the mid 90s.
To be completely honest, I did truly hate that pseudo-thriller
resolution at the very end, which seemed to cheapen the film, but before
that I was enrapt by the film's mysteries, and engrossed by its eroticism,
which includes plenty of nudity from curvaceous Amanda Seyfried as the 'tute
and some from Julianne Moore as the wife whose heightened paranoia drives
the plot. Liam Neeson provides a steady anchor for the film as the
husband, and he matches Moore in one of the most poignant scenes I've seen
in a long time: the two of them finally decide to stop playing games and
meet in public to confront one another directly with their suspicions. The
scene begins in a cafe, seems to be unproductive at first, then moves to
the street where the characters finally connect authentically, with both
actors delivering emotionally charged moments without resorting to any
acting tricks, just by trying for a heightened level of sincerity which
grants us in the audience a much-needed catharsis after all the
gamesmanship we have witnessed. I wish the screenwriter had found a way to
make that scene the film's conclusion.
