Chloe, Atom Egoyan's ripe, psychosexual minuet, poses the infidelity thriller's founding question -- Who am I married to? -- only to leave it to molder, a red herring at last. Even its opening monologue, in which the title character, an upscale call girl played by Amanda Seyfried, makes a compelling case for her market value, is a bit of a feint: this is not a film about what men want, or why they cheat, although the gauzy boudoir shots of Seyfried snapping into her La Perla may suggest otherwise. Able to intuit and attend to the every fantasy and exquisite pressure point of her clients, what Chloe gets out of the bargain, when the sex worker stars align, is to disappear. It's a trick and a trap that powers much of Chloe's rich but blaringly unsubtle treatment of both its central relationship and the larger prism of female sexual identity.
Twenty years Chloe's senior, what Catherine (Julianne Moore) fears most is the encroaching invisibility the younger woman seems to crave. A high-end gynecologist (if you'll excuse the term, and the fact that we don't actually have those in Canada), Catherine has an office on Toronto's snooty Yorkville strip and a cubist home in its poshest neighborhood. She's beautiful, married to Liam Neeson (playing a professor named David), and has a sexually active teenage son named Michael (Max Thierot). She's also terrible at her job: what kind of gynecologist would brush off a mortified woman's searching confession (in stirrups, no less) to never having had an orgasm with the equivalent of, "it's just a series of muscle contractions, I wouldn't worry about it."
The kind who hasn't had a really good one in a while, evidently. When David misses his own surprise party and Catherine finds a vaguely incriminating photo of him with a student on his phone (in having her later interrupt the electronic interactions her son and David have with women, Egoyan neatly captures the offhanded alienation of the "communication" age), she assumes the worst. She also takes the rather drastic step of hiring the comely prostitute she met in the bathroom of a hotel restaurant to try and seduce her husband. Cheaters meets the Windsor Arms? Not quite, although Erin Cressida Wilson's (Secretary) script, based on the 2003 film Nathalie..., can't quite manage that film's self-possessed, quintessentially French combination of sang froid and simmering melodrama. Taken with Catherine's polished beauty and yielding manner, Chloe trains those giant fetus eyes on her like a wounded, crafty animal, and their brief but intense cycle of co-dependence is built on the exercise in sexual storytelling that ensues.
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.