LITTLE ROCK — Sexy, slight and lacking the usual tones of leaden anomie associated with his more personal work, Atom Egoyan’s Chloe feels like a kind of busman’s holiday for the Egypt-born Canadian director, whose essays on politics (erotic and otherwise) have grown increasingly shaggy over the years. Maybe it should be taken as a job for hire, a way for Egoyan to keep busy while securing financing for his next strange trip.
That said, no one ought to mistake Chloe for a conventional movie, least of all the romantic dramedy its posters seem to promise. (If you’ve seen the red band trailer then you know what I mean.) It is a fairly straightforward remake of a fairly messed-up French film, Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie (2003), in which Fanny Ardant enlisted the services of a prostitute (Emmanuelle Beart) to sleep with her dubious husband (Gerard Depardieu) and later debrief her on the act.
Transplant the scenario to clean and clutterless Toronto, where Julianne Moore is a gynecologist who suspects her cheerful, flirty professor husband David (Liam Neeson, well cast) of philandering. Enter Chloe (Amanda Seyfried, of Big Love and Mama Mia!) as a fresh-faced hooker who gets around town on a bicycle.
As silly as it all seems, the actors do earnest, unwinking work which, somewhat ironically, makes the whole enterprise even sillier. The screenplay is pimpled with tuneless dialogue, implausibilities and gratuitous nudity that plays as camp. In short, it’s sort of like a send-up of the typicalEgoyan film, without any of the unsettling, murky stuff he generally infuses.
What keeps it from totally toppling over into Adrian Lyne Skinemax soft-core territory may be the (franklyunwarranted) faith of these actors in Egoyan. Chloe wants to be a black comedy, and it sort of succeeds as a guilty pleasure on the order of Basic Instinct or Disclosure, but we never sense that the casthas been let in on the (dirty) joke. And so to an extent, Chloe feels cruel and prurient, a calculated and heartless movie that barely succeeds on its cool, if barely engaged, intelligence.
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 03/26/2010