Atom Egoyan (2009)
The Kinepolis in Leuven is a very nice cinema. There are clearly indicated seat numbers and lights to see you in and out safely (although I couldn’t, where I was sitting, get them out of my field of vision during the movie). There are seven screens and it seems to be the town’s main film house. A number of screens were showing different films at different times of the day so that a total of ten or more pictures were showing at the Kinepolis the week during which I was in Leuven last month. Except for one Dutch movie, they were all American (including, as well as Chloe, Alice in Wonderland, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Precious, Valentine’s Day and others I’ve lost my note of). There were four trailers, all for American films (Dear John, Green Zone, Robin Hood and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps). Even most of the commercials seemed to be American (although one or two were for local shops – which had a nostalgic charm). I’m not complaining about this evidence of cultural imperialism but you couldn’t help be struck by it.
Chloe – strictly speaking, a Canadian-French-American co-production – tells an old story: a middle-aged wife’s suspicions about her husband bring on problems and trauma which wouldn’t have occurred if she’d kept her doubts to herself. Atom Egoyan takes ninety-six minutes to cover the ground which Kate Bush covered, dramatically and memorably, in ‘Babooshka’, in about three minutes. Catherine (Julianne Moore) is a Toronto gynaecologist. Her husband David (Liam Neeson) is a professor of music. On his birthday, Catherine throws a surprise party for David. Awaiting his arrival as the guests assemble, she has a nervy manner that suggests a larger anxiety. When David phones to tell her he’s missed his flight back from New York, Catherine assumes the worst and, after an apparently chance meeting with an escort called Chloe, hires her to test David’s fidelity. In a prologue, we’ve seen Chloe dressing and explaining, in a wordy voiceover, that she can be anything a man wants her to be. The film proceeds to demonstrate she can be anything a woman wants her to be too: Chloe invents accounts of how she has seduced David and thus confirms Catherine’s fears. (We can only assume that Catherine believes what Chloe says so readily because part of her wants to believe her husband is cheating on her.) When Chloe is done with not seducing the husband, she starts seducing the wife. When that affair founders, Chloe turns her attention to David and Catherine’s teenage son Michael.
The lesbian sex between Catherine and Chloe is presented as kinky and dangerous – it seems to be an expression of Chloe’s psychopathological possessiveness. The moral of the story, hardly a progressive one, seems to be: beware of psychopathic gay call girls. Yet Atom Egoyan and the writer Erin Cressida Wilson, whose screenplay is based on a 2003 French film Nathalie (written and directed by Anne (Coco Before Chanel) Fontaine), seem to have it in for Catherine too. She’s a gynaecologist in order that she can be startled out of her scientific, clinical approach to women’s bodies – as if such an approach was tantamount to lack of feeling. (Responding to a patient who claims never to have had an orgasm, Catherine explains what orgasm is as a physiological event and with a minimum of emotion.) We also see at an early point that Catherine is furious that Michael is sleeping with his girlfriend in the family home – and it soon becomes clear how badly affected the son is by the widening cracks in his parents’ marriage. The implication seems to be that Catherine’s attitude, with its emotionally corrosive effect on Michael, is more corrupting than Chloe’s seduction of him. This all reads like the sort of thing you might get excited about at the age of about nineteen – the storyline and the supporting ideas sound brilliantly neat and penetrating – but Erin Cressida Wilson is actually in her mid-forties. I haven’t seen Secretary (2002), which appears to have launched Wilson’s screenwriting career, and she certainly did American cinema a good turn in that Secretary also launched Maggie Gyllenhaal. But Wilson – on the evidence of her previous screenplay Fur and Chloe – seems to be a floridly bad writer.
Chloe plays out as comically melodramatic. The vast, cold house in which Catherine and David live out their unhappy marriage looks a cross between a laboratory and a deserted art gallery. The disappointment is that everyone seems to be not just playing it straight – as they should – but taking it seriously (Mychael Danna’s score is an immediate clue to this). After her welcome, surprising outburst of jazzy vibrancy in A Single Man, Julianne Moore resumes normal service here. She is a good actress but she nearly always plays miserable characters, and she seems too discreet to make misery entertaining, however extreme and improbable the character’s situation may be. You never feel in Chloe that Moore’s Catherine is in the grip of an obsession – either with believing her husband is errant or with Chloe. When things get really ludicrous the film might be more enjoyable if the part of Catherine were played by someone with a greater flair for melodrama. To make matters worse, this is yet another recent film in which the female lead has lunch with women friends so antipathetic that you can’t believe she ever had anything in common with them. Julianne Moore’s gloomy aura gives the set-up extra incredibility: the trio she meets up with are prurient airheads (‘Are you having an affair, Catherine?! …’) who seem to come from another planet. As Chloe, Amanda Seyfried is competent but she lacks depth and she has to act sexy. The odd effect of having an actress of this kind in a role like Chloe is to make the character seem more lewd than if the performer had a naturally strong sexual presence (it’s the Natalie Wood syndrome). Liam Neeson is all right when David is shown as easily charming or unable to understand why Catherine is so angst-ridden; he’s bad in the one scene where he starts yelling. Max Thieriot wins some sympathy in the thankless role of the son (who’s supposed to be a brilliant music student – he does a solo piano recital at one point).
The sequence in which David phones to tell Catherine he’ll be later than expected is pretty typical of the lousy script and the exaggerated direction. The street from which David makes the call is lit to suggest he’s calling from one of the lowest circles of hell rather than New York – it’s not clear why, when Atom Egoyan has already made it obvious there’s an innocent-ish explanation for David’s missing his plane. (We can see from his performance in a lecture theatre that David is at least a showoff, and probably a flirt, with his students of both sexes. They adore him and want to take him out for a drink: he says he can’t because it’s his birthday and his wife is organising something but David is evidently a man who enjoys being adored – it would be easy enough for the students to twist his arm successfully.) Egoyan and Wilson are, however, evasive about more challenging issues raised by the story – like the question of Catherine’s sexual orientation. It’s unclear whether the lesbian affair is an aberration or the kind of sex she wanted all along. (Are we meant to infer that gynaecology is the natural career choice for a repressed gay woman?) The closing sequence of Michael’s graduation – after Chloe has departed the scene and this life – is opaque too. We seem to be supposed to think that life will never be the same again as a result of Chloe – but what exactly has Catherine destroyed? Her marriage seems to have been loveless for years and her son already hated her. The fact that Liam Neeson ends up looking reasonably jolly and Julianne Moore utterly miserable suggests that not much has changed.
15 March 2010
