Atom Egoyan directed, Chloe, a remake of Nathalie, a French movie, which I did not know until after watching it, and Julianne Moore stars in it as Catherine, a gynecologist, mother and wife feeling drawn to the titular character played by Amanda Seyfriend, a call girl, when she feels emotionally exiled from the men in her life, which include David, her husband, played by Liam Neeson, and Michael, her son, played by Bates Motel’s Max Thieriot.
Can I see a movie without it being a remake of another movie? Is there such a thing as original content? I guess that I’m going down another rabbit hole and putting Nathalie in my queue now. It was by happenstance that I watched Chloe after Knock Knock. Both movies were expiring from streaming on Netflix and Hulu respectively, but they deal with a similar phenomenon: the fiction of no emotional consequences to sexual acts that do not take place within the confines of a committed relationship. Surprisingly Chloe seemed less psychologically realistic than Knock Knock in its exploration of the motives of the intruder and less shocking and more predictable in terms of plot. The narrative suggests a shifting of perspective between the four characters, but by the denouement, it becomes clear that it is primarily seen through Catherine’s eyes, who is an unreliable narrator projecting and looking for permission to act on her desires. The ostensible purpose of Chloe is that intimacy is rooted in connection through conversation more than physical contact, and Catherine uses Chloe as a surrogate to reconnect to her husband and son.
Chloe as a film is burgeoning with sexuality, but it seems a bit much. Catherine’s office partner, whom we only see when they socialize, dates a much younger woman and is an external representation of what Catherine wishes that she was like: making sexually inappropriate comments and nonchalant about hiring hookers to satisfy his sexual desires. The waitress’ menu description sounds like a sex act. Her husband seems drawn to everyone, but her. Her son is beginning to embrace his sexual side and rejects any attention from her. All of this triggers Catherine’s anxiety and leads to the Rube Goldbergian plot to find out if her husband is cheating on her as a respectable veneer for her own attraction to women and specifically Chloe, whom she was looking at before anything happened.
Catherine is a strange male fantasy personified. She is a gynecologist, but her role seems to be less professional or medicinal, and more latently sexual from the first scene with the young dancer and the way that she bounces back and forth between client and caretaker whether tending to Chloe’s scrapes or showing concern over her cold. Initially I thought her intrusion on her son’s personal life was motherly concern, but she is less interested in him when his girlfriend is not walking around half naked or appearing on a computer. She is provoked by the girlfriend’s body and living vicariously through him. He is just the vehicle. If this movie was less tentative, it would fully embrace Catherine’s jealousy of her son and husband’s ability to engage sexually with younger women without notice from society and merge it with her own midlife crisis anxieties of loss of beauty and not being seen. By casting the waitress as a younger version of Moore, it is the closest that the movie gets to teasing out this theme. The fact that every character, especially the secretary, sees her attraction before she does actually works as a way to clue viewers into the real story behind what the movie depicts.
Sex work is still work, but the movie never shows that reality. Chloe purports to delve into the call girl’s motives, but her intent is just another fantasy of the high-class call girl who is not in it for the money, but is actually attracted to her client. This trope only fulfills the client’s fantasy: all the sexual availability and ego boost with none of the sleaziness of a commercial transaction and inadequacy for not being able to sexually attract people without paying. The twist that the client is a woman, not a man, may be revolutionary, but seems like another fantasy brought to life on celluloid. In the end, despite all her protests, there are no real consequences for Catherine for interacting with Chloe, who tidily disposes of herself from the complications that she poses once she fixes all of Catherine’s relationship issues with her husband and son. Chloe is the Jesus of hookers. I also saw the twist coming from the beginning of the movie because movies love making sexually available women crazy. I was actually hoping that the twist was who was actually administering the test, but alas, no.
This is not a criticism of Thieriot’s acting, but actually high praise: Michael annoyed the hell out of me, but seemed sadly realistic. You can’t do whatever you want in someone else’s house. He expected privacy, but was all up in his parents’ drama and made it all about him when they asked for the same courtesy. Also I get that his mom feels like a voyeuristic stalker at home, but then don’t seek her attention by going to her job, using her photocopier and getting your tux from her then tell her to back off when she interacts with you there. Of course, he would not second-guess why a hot girl would be interested in him, but the final scenes did not quite tie together. I get that he matured and realized that his mom was a person, and sex came with some sobering consequences, but he seemed less aggrieved than he normally would be given what we saw of his character. I felt like his storyline was a prurient after thought that wanted to provocatively get as close to incest as possible without going over the line, which did not work.
If there are practical lessons to be learned from Chloe, celebrate your birthday with your family even if you don’t want to and stop throwing parties for people that don’t want them. Real talk: there is no movie if the husband stopped acting cagey, and the wife stopped begrudgingly celebrating milestones. David learns this lesson, and she does not! Seriously stop it! Why are you living a lie? You don’t even like these people. You resent playing hostess.
Sad side note: in the middle of filming Chloe, Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, got injured and died. I don’t know how you finish a job in the midst of all that so shout out to Neeson’s professionalism. Subsequently he acted through suffering a stroke.
Even without seeing Nathalie, after decades of watching film, a solid rule is to always watch the French original, not the English language remake, even if the remake is set in Canada. Don’t fear subtitles. They are your friends. It isn’t Chloe’s fault that remakes of foreign language films always lose something in translation. Skip it unless you must see every film with Moore or Seyfried.