Chloe

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

Release Date: March 19, 2010

Starring: Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried

Director: Atom Egoyan

Premise: A doctor hires an escort to seduce her husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though unforeseen events put the family in danger.

[modage]

A sexy thriller.  Where's Paul Verhoeven?

[ono]

After much thought, movie titles should never be just names of people.  Sorry, Sydney.  Biopics don't count, but they're usually boring, pointless, and incapable of changing anything or anyone (Gandhi aside).

As for the movie itself - good to see the dead chick from V-Mars alive again.  Those eyes.  This seems beneath Egoyan, but just as the title "Exotica" misdirected expectations, here's hoping this one serves to lower expectations and pleasantly surprise.  With Moore and Neeson, I'm so there, and it seems to have a little more to it than your run-of-the-mill thriller.  Just... that title.  Ugh.

[Stefen]

What about Patton? Barry Lyndon?

[ono]

Very good question.  Haven't seen Patton, so I can't comment on that.  Eponymous titles assume you know who the person is.  A safe(r) assumption with Patton, but still iffy.

My reaction goes to the fact that titles should tell you a little something about what to expect, and leave you with something before and after.  Without seeing it, "Chloe" tells you nothing.  Neither does "Sydney" (Hard Eight is no better, just meant to attract a wider, unsuspecting audience).  As much as PTA wants that film to be about Sydney (and ultimately it is, illustrated by the final scene), it's still also about John and Clementine, especially in that hotel room with the john, and their escape afterwards.

As for Barry Lyndon, it's been a while since I've seen the film itself, but the problems are similar.  Granted, "Barry Lyndon" is a more unique name than Chloe or Sydney, and it's a little more excusable since Barry *is* the picture, but still it doesn't inform you.  "The Luck of Barry Lyndon", the title of the original novel, would probably be a better title.  Though I can understand Kubrick wanting to shorten it, it's doing the film a disservice.

The next obvious course of action is "What about this film?  And this one?  Whattabout Lolita, for example?"  Novel written first, then adapted.  Chloe hasn't entered popular culture in the way "Lolita" has.  So people don't know, yet, what a "Chloe" is capable of.

[SiliasRuby]

I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Two of my fav. actresses in the world. So giddy.

[Gold Trumpet]

Unless you're in the advertising business, I don't know why anyone would make any assumptions names for titles mattering at all. They don't (for good or bad).

[Stefen]

The Sweet Hereafter is still one of the best movies ever, but I haven't liked anything else Atom Egoyan has done.

[polkablues]

This seems beneath Egoyan, but just as the title "Exotica" misdirected expectations

Not to mention the box cover. You should have seen the look on the Best Buy girl's face when I brought that one up to the checkout.

[Pubrick]

haha of course silias would love this, great fapping material. no offence dude i bought Where the Truth Lies for the same reason.

that's all Egoyan does these days. i don't know what kind of rough patch he's going through with his wife but he just can't stop thinking of innocent starlets getting naked! see: Lohman and the blonde chick in Where The Truth Lies. now it's seyfried.

i don't really like this soft core porn phase of his career. every movie he made prior to it was substantially better.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

'Chloe' creates an odd triangle on and off-screen
The remake of a French thriller united an unusual group of colleagues for a story about paranoia.
By Mark Olsen; Los Angeles Times

They make for a very unlikely trio of collaborators: Ivan Reitman, director and producer of blockbuster Hollywood comedies, art house director Atom Egoyan and Erin Cressida Wilson, writer of the cult hit "Secretary." Yet, they have come together as producer, director and writer, respectively, on the dark, sexy thriller "Chloe," which opens Friday.

Perhaps even more unusual than the collaboration itself is the genesis of the partnership: It started with "Ghostbusters" director Reitman, who first saw the French erotic thriller "Nathalie . . . ," directed by Anne Fontaine, at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival and became interested in pursuing a remake. He sought out Wilson to collaborate on the screenplay with the initial intention to direct the film himself.

The film tells the story of Catherine and David Stewart (Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson), a successful Toronto couple -- she's an OB-GYN, he's a music professor -- who have grown distant over their long marriage.

Concerned that her husband might be cheating, Catherine hires a call girl, Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), to see if he can be seduced. Implicitly understanding that the wife wants more than knowledge of unfaithfulness, Chloe begins to tell Catherine intimate details of liaisons with David. When Catherine attempts to pull back from the arrangement, Chloe pursues her son, entangling them all in a web of jealousy and obsession that will have irreparable consequences.

"I've been married a long time, and I think sexuality in marriage, particularly long-term marriages, is an interesting subject that we almost barely touch in Hollywood," Reitman said. "And I was looking for an interesting movie to direct that was really different than anything I had done previously in my career. So, I thought, 'Let's see where this can go.' "

But as the project progressed over a number of years, Reitman realized he might not be the best director for the job. He turned to Egoyan, director of "Exotica" and the powerful drama "The Sweet Hereafter," to take on the project.

"It was really just a sense of, 'Yes, I could do this movie, but this guy's going to do a better job than me,' " Reitman said. "It's so much more in his wheelhouse than mine, and as tempted as I was to try something like that, I guess my instincts as a producer sort of took over, and I felt like the actors and what they'd have to do for the film would be more comfortable with him directing than me directing."

The film maps the icy remove of Egoyan's sensibility onto the structure of an overheated erotic thriller. By playing it straight-faced, "Chloe" manages to be insightful and alluring while also unafraid to be slightly ridiculous -- imagine a 1990s Michael Douglas thriller with Julianne Moore cast as Michael Douglas.

"If all she wanted was information, she could have hired a detective," Egoyan said of the deeper motivations behind the actions of Moore's character. "She's not sure what she wants, but once she begins to hear it, there is something both lurid and exciting but weirdly punishing as well."

"I thought it was a fun challenge to bring a character study to a piece of pop entertainment," Wilson added. "The film is about paranoia that builds between four different people, but my hope is it's actually fun and salacious and sexy and scary as much as it is thoughtful and deep and occasionally funny.

"My joke is I was Chloe when I started and I ended up as Catherine by the time I was done."

Wilson's original screenplay was set in San Francisco, but when Egoyan came aboard, it was transposed to Toronto.

Shooting Toronto as Toronto, being able to show off some of the city's notable contemporary architecture in ways that can't be done when the city so frequently acts as a stand-in for other locations, was particularly intriguing for Egoyan.

"In a way," Egoyan said, "given what the film is about, at the level of metaphor it's interesting because Toronto is a prostitute, as a city very often it pretends to be New York or Chicago or San Francisco. So it's interesting that since this is a film about that, that in fact the city becomes a character."

In a flip of the typical tropes of the erotic thriller, "Chloe" focuses on a woman coming to grips with her own diminishing sense of being desired, something of a female anxiety variation on male virility issues, providing a rarely glimpsed window onto marriage, aging and sexuality.

Though it would be facile to do so, the film could even be read as somehow pro-adultery, or at least as suggesting that sometimes long-term relationships need something to jolt them from their everyday complacency.

"I think of it as pro-communication, pro-fantasy and pro-intimacy," countered Wilson. "No matter what age we are, we still have desires, and marriages aren't just still things. They are growing organisms that change, and they go through these terrible times sometimes and we get through them or sometimes we don't. And people do the darndest things."

[Captain of Industry]

It ends where it begins and is methodical and predictable the whole way there.  Except there's this slight The Children are Watching Us angle that I kind of enjoyed.  As for the fapping references above, if you wish to know the potential:

SEXY SPOILER

Amanda Seyfried fingerfucks Julianne Moore as they engage in passionate and unbridled lesbian sex with one another.

[Captain of Industry]

But in a Paranormal Activity/Antichrist way it's fun to see Chloe as the psychosexual thriller equivalent of the subversive and romantically funny Greenberg.

I was thinking in the shower.

[Stefen]

lol.