Chloe (2009)

If Chloe turned out to be a more pretentious Fatal Attraction, I’d be alright with that.

Hey, when the woman from Heroes and Beyonce fought for Stringer Bell on the big screen, I paid to see that. It was cheesy and fun. The beauty of the 'psycho hose beast' genre is the stupider and OTT and unlikely things get the more enjoyable, it's likely to be. Just talking about it, I wanna watch Single White Female or Basic Instinct 2- Tits Magee Takes a Holiday. But what would happen if you took a arty director like Atom Egoyan and a script from the writer of the exquisite Secretary? Does that mean it would it turn out so-bad-it's-good or just bad?


Chloe, simply told, is the story of a woman doctor (not being sexist -the term gynaecology just freaks me out) Julianne Moore who suspects her husband, Liam Neeson of having an affair or infidelity. She arranges for a prostitute to test him, to see if he takes the bait, the titular Chloe (Titular.)
Through the eyes of Julianne Moore's character Catherine, she seems to be stuck in an episode of the Twilight Zone where all the men are guilty, boorish leches and the women are naive, attractive nubiles. The exception being Chloe. She seems to embody all these things. She seems as guilty as she is naive. She'd be androgynous if she wasn't so feminine.
Chloe's (Amanda Seyfried) relationship with Catherine develops as she reports back what happens at these meetings with her husband. We can see that Chloe doesn't really seem in this arrangement for the money; she's not exactly yeoman-like with Liam Neeson's character David but she's much more interested in Catherine herself.
If she isn't doing it for the money, what's driving Chloe? 
We wonder what her intentions are for David? But really, what are her intentions for Catherine?
It almost goes without saying, it's so well written by Erin Cressida Wilson. Every character could have been lazy architypes- the vengeful wife, the mental other woman, the arsehole husband but you don't think of any of the main characters that way and Moore and Seyfried are just phenomenal here.


Julianne Moore- I expect it from. Julianne Moore has always had a knack of being brilliant in anything she’s in; from Boogie Nights to A Single Man to *BFF* (Best Film Forever), The Big Lebowski. Chloe is no different- I’m not a middle-aged woman who’s unsure of her place in the world, but I felt like I was with her character does every step of the way.
So if Julianne Moore is one of the best, most consistent actresses working today, if must be horrible for the young actress who has to keep up but the real success of Chloe is Amanda Seyfried. The character of Chloe is no-cake walk. She has to be the anti-hero – the villain you love to hate but by some miracle, she’s comes across as this sensitive girl who develops this deep obsession. It would be understandable, perhaps even, forgivable if her character becomes this Fatal Attraction-style baddie in the end but it’s testament to Seyfried, that she never becomes that. In the end, you just wish someone had given Chloe the love she needed earlier.
The amazing thing that Egoyan pulls off with Chloe is that it's sexy without being explicit. When the characters do get nekkid, it's not salacious or for effect or if it is for effect, it's because the characters are responsible NOT the director. The other sexy character in  Chloe is Toronto, it looks like gorgeous hot chocolate in this film- almost a different city from the exciting Toronto, we saw in Scott Pilgrim...


I watched Chloe on DVD, rented from the lovely Cardiff Central Library.
My 2011 in Movies will return with A Perfect Getaway (2009)...