Chloe is a 2009 drama about how things go bad when a woman hires an escort to test her husband’s faithfulness.
The erotic thriller isn’t exactly a scarcity at the movies, the genre tracing its roots back the 1940s and 50s with Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo, though no doubt got its modern flare for mixing gratuitous sex with violence in Paul Verhoeven‘s Basic Instinct, which pretty much redefined the whole thing and set a new template for what followed, even as stories of dangerous sexual encounters since have done what they can to stand on their own.
With Atom Egoyan‘s 2009 effort Chloe, like Basic Instinct, it centers a lot on the women, and more so, women on both ends of an affair. They are Catherine (Julianne Moore) and Chloe (Amanda Seyfried). Catherine is a successful gynecologist, an attractive middle aged woman and mother of a teen boy. She’s in love with her husband David (Liam Neeson), a popular college professor, who Catherine believes may not be holding up his end of the marriage agreement, especially when she finds a photo in his cellphone of him with a female student, conveniently taken on the night he was supposed to be home for a surprise birthday party.
Chloe is a high end escort, an beautiful young woman Catherine knows is a call girl, meeting her in a restaurant one day and then inviting her for a drink, eventually asking her to test David’s fidelity. She does, a few times, and when describing her interactions with David to his wife, Catherine becomes curiously aroused, causing Chloe to kiss her. While Catherine initially runs from the attraction, a twist in their agreement brings the women together, emotionally and physically, all the while as Catherine steadily believes her marriage is falling apart.
Even from the light description above, you probably already know where this is going, the plot blocked out in a fairly simple trajectory, and for most who have ever seen a movie like this before, not hard to see what’s really happening. There’s a kind of comfort in that anyway, even as Egoyan, working off a script from Erin Cressida Wilson, which is based on Anne Fontaine‘s 2003 French film Nathalie, does what he can to build some genuine suspense with a story that really seems only able to go in one direction.
What makes it work is first, Egoyan’s preservation of authenticity, refusing to sensationalize it with the more conventional eroticism of the lot, even as it explores sexuality and plenty of purposeful nudity. That’s because the characters are all kept grounded, even as they are sort elevated by a thin layer of fantasy that swells the further the story progresses. There are boundless moments of seediness to this that linger in the corners, but are mostly kept in check as Egoyan presses for a more emotional connection than a blatant retread of the myriad fleshy softcore wanna-bes crowding the shelves, even with a sexually-charged story and a flagrant moment of lustful on-screen intimacy.
However, the best of this is Moore and Seyfried. Moore is a classic, a talented, Academy Award-winning actor who has no fear in getting raw on film, creating a number of vulnerable film characters that have explored both sexuality and traumatizing emotional imbalance. Her performance in Boogie Nights earned her an Oscar nomination and is regarded as some of the best work she’s ever done. Here, Catherine is a tricky bit to play, a woman who in the wrong hands, would plummet right into parody, moments throughout the movie loaded with cheese appeal that could easily send this into boundless realms of silliness. However, in what could be slated as a minor miracle, Moore grabs hold of the reigns and constantly steers this into the believable, portraying an aging woman frayed by her belief that she has lost all her appeal and ability to seduce.
Then there’s Seyfried (who we’ve featured before), only twenty-four-years-old at the time, walking a thin line herself with the titular Chloe, embracing her dynamic physical presence with just the right sexual sensibility and hints of menace. She’s fun to watch, even as you surely know what she’s doing with Chloe and where the story is leading her. She doesn’t ever reach for the outwardly obvious dominating sexuality of say, Sharon Stone‘s Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, knowing her age and experience couldn’t possibly allow her such, so instead grabs hold of the more subtle aspects of a young women with clear power over those she meets. It’s a complex performance.
These women absolutely electrify Chloe, even as the movie itself doesn’t always hold true to its larger themes, the script and Egoyan occasionally unable to escape the trappings of the genre when ramping up towards its somewhat generic finale that sort of unfairly solves problems that should have longer consequences. Either way, Chloe is an above average thriller weighted by it meaningful entanglements and an excellent attention to personalities and behaviors, making this a story well worth jumping into.