CHLOE

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Blackmail Kisses
Atom Egoyan Turns on the Red Light
By Cole Smithey

You couldn't ask for a higher-caliber sexploitation flick than "Chloe," even if the sex thriller falls flatter than day-old quiche. Atom Egoyan rekindles his lurking soft-core desires thanks to a tawdry script by Eric Cressida Wilson. Wilson’s 2002 film "Secretary" is a minor classic that transcended its cultural movement of sexual identity. Unfortunately audiences will have no such luck with this formulaic suspense picture about sexual deception.

Julianne Moore's Catherine Stewart is a successful Toronto OB/GYN and the wife of a well-liked college professor, David (Liam Neeson). David is loyal but an inveterate flirt, but a flirt nonetheless. David's failure to make it back to the couple's palatial modern home in time for his "surprise" birthday party sets Catherine's teeth on edge.

Catherine thinks David is carrying on an affair with a student. Catherine makes the mistake of a lifetime when she hires local call girl Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) in order to to discover if her husband can be tempted into cheating. But Catherine's plan backfires unpredictably. Chloe accurately reads her employer's intentions and strings Catherine along — to keep the money coming in.

Wilson's script sets up Chloe as the film's protagonist apparent, then backpedals in a game of musical chairs that shifts the focus between the hooker, the couple, and even their romantically inclined teenage son Michael (Max Thieriot). The film slips into a predictable dilemma that punishes the audience for its curiosity about the title character. Such blackmail kisses written to cinematic ransom ought to be less conspicuous and considerably less ambiguous.

Atom Egoyan wants to titillate his audience, and he achieves his aim with an unexpected lesbian relationship that builds after Chloe seduces Catherine. Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried steam up the screen in the hottest lesbian coupling since Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve got busy in Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film "The Hunger." The fact that the Moore and Seyfried share several such scenes all but guarantees the film's eventual cult status in the realm of soft core celebrity porn.

From the moment Chloe describes in detail her first alleged sexual encounter with David — which we objectively witness in flashback — she comprehends Catherine's sexual obsession as a malleable desire that she, Chloe, can capitalize on from a most intimate position. But by then the story has already shifted focus and relegated Chloe as its cunning antagonist.

Chloe's evocative opening monologue, in which she expounds on her quicksilver ability to fall into any sexual stereotype role her client requires, proves to be a slithering red herring. As such, the film squanders its most valuable narrative asset, Chloe. By focusing on the glass, steel, and concrete reality of the Stewart's clinically austere family home rather than following Chloe into her own never-viewed personal world, "Chloe" loses its thematic momentum. The film slips into a predictable dilemma that punishes the audience for its curiosity about the title character. Such blackmail kisses written to cinematic ransom should be less conspicuous and considerably less ambiguous.

(Sony Pictures Classics) Rated R. 96 mins.