In Theaters: Chloe

Although David and Chloe's first meeting -- an innocent exchange of sugar and smiles in a café -- is played out almost in its entirety, for most of the debrief sessions there are only glancing flashbacks, and the character of David recedes into a distant monolith, an idea through which Catherine confronts her anxieties. All we really know about their marriage is that she passed 40 at some point and they no longer pick each other up at the airport. The focus remains on the two women, and the surrender of information -- ostensibly about what it is her husband wants from a woman -- that Catherine will pay and pay for.

Seyfried is remarkable, at once a twisted child blithely mouthing the stories that drive adults to madness and a giddy young woman under the influence. The look not of relief but tender empathy that flashes over Moore's face when she hears that her husband was impotent is so true it's almost blinding. And yet it is hard to watch her fretting over her own beauty, particularly when every shot of her is more luminous than the next. Of the two it is clearly Chloe who feels more convincingly used up, despite the stealth with which she wields her charms. The physical juxtaposition of the women -- Moore small and square-bodied, Seyfried bearing a feline softness that seems to extend past her body -- is also an entrée to the film's notion of received identity. Seemingly lost without a clear reflection in her husband's eyes, Catherine is constantly looking in the mirror, and obsessed with how David sees Chloe.

And who wouldn't be? A combination of fairy princess and alien sex surrogate, Chloe is more successful as a kind of psychic emanation than she is as a character. A symbol of Catherine's fixation on the loss of her own youth and perceived undesirability made manifest and then purged in the name of progress, it is only when the Chloe's giant, adoring eyes -- and shortly thereafter, her gifted fingers -- are turned on her that Catherine recovers some form of self-worth. The cruel reckoning and casual entitlement that follows, though trite and ultimately disappointing, contains an astute critique of the less obvious and more uncomfortable forms of transaction -- I'll love you if you love me; I'll see you the way you want me to -- that underlie even our most sacred relationships.

From its clean, enameled surfaces to the impeccable sleekness of its stars, the look of Chloe pointedly belies the dishevelment of its subject. In fact there isn't really a function of either Egoyan's alternately coolly and cloyingly probing direction or Wilson's script that isn't pointed. Hardly known for his sense of humor but capable of a kind of amused knowing, Egoyan can't quite maintain control of the hoarier aspects of the material, often cruising -- as with a shot of Moore's thin ankle creeping up her calf while she listens to a graphic description of her husband's exertions -- into hostile, campy territory. Imperfect and yet resonant, like great but guilty sex, Chloe's aesthetic is both distancing and, largely on the strength of Moore's translucent performance and Seyfried's boldness, forcibly intimate.

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