Terrible-hunting: Chloe

The one thing you must know about Atom Egoyan's Chloe (recently out on DVD):

But, oh, there is more.

The story of Chloe is basically the story of Kate Bush's "Babooshka" with a modern, Sapphic twist. She wanted to test her husband, she knew exactly what to do: instead of a pseudonym to fool him, she employed a prostitute to fool him. Or so she thought! I won't give away what happens in this erotically charged story about very erotic women and full of erotic dialogue that is certainly erotic...oh wait, yes I will: the wife in question (Julianne Moore's Catherine) is duped by her hired whore (Amanda Seyfried's Chloe), who never actually meets Catherine's "tall, strong, chestnut-haired" husband (virtual non-entity David, played by Liam Neeson) and under the guise of recounting their encounters to Catherine, spins erotic fiction for her client chock full of fur-coat diary entries like, "He said to me, ‘I can’t cum, I can’t cum, I have to go to work.’ But I didn’t stop. And then I bit his tongue.” I feel like a million pornos have been made with this plot (Take My Husband, Please...And Fuck the Shit Out of Him), but because this is Canadian, often has the haziness of a coffee commercial and doesn't show pink, it gets a mainstream pass. OK, then!

More a groaner than a thriller, Chloe is pure cheese and a hell of a lot of fun up until its conventional third act, which is tame by the standards set by virtually every other R-rated domestic suspense flick of the past 30 years (including itself in its first two acts). In spirit, it is the best kind of garbage: hilarious but unsmiling and fitting perfectly into my criteria for what makes the garbagest of garbage cinema. Come, let's put it through the ringer:

Incompetence

Keep trying to persuade me that this is hot, Chloe. I know I'm gay and male but I'm also in possession of all of my senses, and Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried's onscreen chemistry smells a lot more like bullshit than musty lady odor.

I haven't mentioned that Catherine is a gynecologist, so she falls into this verbal, then physical affair with ease. Her big lesson? Vaginas can be just as interesting when you're off duty. It's nothing short of erotic irony when she finally gets examined (that shot isn't exactly NSFW, but you might want to avoid it just to be safe IF YOU'RE LAME AND DON'T ENJOY LESBIAN FINGERBANGING). Patient beats doctor! Some will masturbate to this (I mean...I guess?); others will chortle. The latter group is the correct one.

I mean, ew (that one's definitely not safe for work, YOU PATHETIC HOMOPHOBE). While in bed, Chloe looks up at Catherine with the expectancy of someone who needs ice and decided to go searching in a frigid set of female genitalia to find it. Way to pick a fire crotch, asshole.

The lesser moments that supposedly factor into the sexual tension before the big bang are just as eye-roll worthy. Passing some toilet paper between bathroom stalls...

...applying a bandage to a skinned knee...

 

...and sharing hand lotion...

 

...are all supposed to moisten the atmosphere/panties. All I could think of in the scene above was, "It puts the lotion on the skin." SO NOT HOT.

Chloe, in the spirit of erotic-thriller vixens, ends up seducing more than one member of this family, targeting Catherine's sexually active son, Michael (whom Catherine's probably jealous of by virtue of the fact that he's getting laid and she isn't -- that isn't me surmising, it's practically written into the script, which: GROSS). They talk about bands and at one point, Chloe asks him, "Do you have a page?" (as in Friendster, probably) BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOUNG PEOPLE TALK.

Absurdity

Oh, there is plenty. First of all, Catherine masturbates to Chloe and David's nonexistent affair, more connected to him than ever, as these dissolves point out:

 

 

Her head on his, her hand on his. They are connected via nothing! How fraudulently poetic. How perfect for Chloe.

In the aforementioned knee-treatment scene, Catherine goes to cut off Chloe's stockings, but instead Chloe decides to pull them down. They're ruined anyway with a giant hole in the knee, but how often to you get a legitimate excuse to pull down what's covering your ass in public?

Catherine is a total nightmare, by the way. She's so uptight, Chloe might as well have gone digging for diamonds instead of ice cubes (yet another reason why her erotic awakening feels so contrived -- she goes from zero to oozing in seconds). She micromanages Chloe's supposed dalliances with her husband ("I didn't ask you to do that!" she says when Chloe reveals that David asked if he could kiss her) and is extremely concerned with everyone's STD status (this is how life is for a gynecologist, I suppose). This reveals a major gender divide -- men tell whores, "Show me your tits"; women tell whores who are sleeping with their husbands, "Show me your results."

When Catherine finally pulls back and Chloe isn't ready to give up her red-floss source, she starts harassing Catherine, leaving messages at her office and sending her blackmail potential via email. At one point, Chloe calls...

 

...and it turns out that the call...is coming...from...

 

...inside the gynecologist's office!!!! HORRORS.

Melodrama

Chloe is even more attention-starved than her frustrated-wife client, and so she does things to win Catherine's sympathy:

 

Chloe's overacting, but then, so's the woman who's playing her:

 

On the upside (or is it?), Julianne's patented crying face is at a minimum.

Still, the movie itself is full of pauses (more on that in a sec), including this one:

 

I guess gynecology must be feeling the recession, because she's clearly on dial-up. Whose images load that slowly? That shit was taken with a whore's cell-phone camera, which could only be, like, 2 megapixels at best. How big could the fucking file be?

Extreme view points

 

In several situations, it is implied and observed that whores are everywhere. Apparently, they infest Toronto like a greedy bunch of cockroaches in heat. It's just as well, really: the bigger the whore population, the better to eat your pussy with! Bwah! Ha! Haaaaaa!

Miscellaneous weirdness or quirks

For a movie about a lesbian affair, it's pretty ironic that there are so many pregnant pauses here. Sample exchange:

Catherine: How do you do this (whoring)?

Chloe:

 

Catherine:

 

Chloe (finally): I try to find something to love in everybody...

(The fact that Chloe is a clingy whore could probably have been filed under each one of the Terrible-hunting categories.)

Anyway, these women mostly communicate via their eyes and expressions. They are mimes, basically.

And acting is reacting (or whatever!) and I guess every movie is full of still, contemplative moments, but they seem in abundance here. It all feels like forced subtlety, like these characters are buckling under the weight of their own introspection ABOUT WHORING.

It ends with a confrontation in front of a giant window -- Chloe is eventually pushed out, and she accepts her fate graciously.

I consider that quirky in the same way that I consider the guy who dies in a plane crash in Alanis Morrisette's "Ironic" ("Well isn't this nice") quirky.

The last image is, of course, ridiculous -- Chloe's dead (if she ever was alive in the first place!) and Catherine can continue her life with her family. We see her hosting a party, and as she turns around...

 

...we see that she is wearing the hair thing Chloe gave her. Chloe is still part of her! She's lucky that's all Chloe gave her. When you mess with a hooker, you could come away with something far itchier. Good for Catherine!

Comments

[Gary]

Dude, your gay and being way to hard on this film. But as far as reviews go your a f&ckin artist....

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Yeah!! she is quite erotic.

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