Chloe

City Paper Grade: B-

by Cindy Fuchs

SPLITTING ATOMS: Amanda Seyfried plays the titular prostitute in Atom Egoyan's Chloe. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

[ City Paper Grade: B- ]

"I guess I've always been pretty good with words," says Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) as she dresses. She's good at telling stories, at knowing what her partners want to hear, at soliciting compliance and giving pleasure. She's a prostitute, and yes, her words are as crucial to her work as her lingerie.

A reinvention of Anne Fontaine's Nathalie, Atom Egoyan's film focuses on the particular stories she tells Catherine (Julianne Moore). They meet cute in the bathroom at an upscale restaurant. Chloe's sobbing in a stall, lamenting the generic evils men do, and Catherine's inclined to be sympathetic, having just determined that her own husband, David (Liam Neeson), is cheating. At the same time, her teenage son Michael (Max Thieriot) is behaving badly, keeping his girlfriend in his room overnight despite, and because of, his mom's unhappy reaction.

Still, the women's relationship isn't exactly friendly. Rather, Catherine hires Chloe to tempt and test David, to flirt with him and then report on his responses. As Chloe's stories unnerve but also fascinate Catherine, they share a sense of injury and resentment, but also confirmation of their mutual suspicions, Catherine's premised on her already roiling distrust and Chloe's on ... well, it would appear to be her experience as a hooker, but maybe it's something else, too.

It doesn't help matters that Catherine is a gynecologist, that she spends her daytimes in a multi-windowed office checking women's insides. It's an office design bound to make anyone feel under surveillance, though Catherine's inclination toward deception does seem extreme — not to mention her investment in Chloe, who is strange and self-serving from the jump. The film — much like Egoyan's other work, from Family Viewing to The Sweet Hereafter to Adoration — considers the intersections of intimacy and distrust, longing and fear, especially as these come together in stories.

It's in stories that Chloe suggests we make ourselves, as well as others. Unfortunately, for all the poetry and insinuation of its images, the movie goes off the rails near its end with yet another damaged, duplicitous woman wreaking havoc, her story turns more tedious than provocative.