I am sometimes wondering about the bad choices made by one director or the other, or by one actor or another. When such a gathering of talents like Atom Egoyan – director of Ararat, Liam Neeson – star of Schindler’s List or Julianne Moore – four time nominated for an Oscar, share the same bad choice I am simply stunned. None of them is visibly on the decreasing slope of their respective careers, none was known to have huge debts to be obliged to accept any role, so why picking a film based on such a stupid and incredible story, with a bad taste that comes close to soft porn – and this is not because of the quantity of skin shown on screen but because the way the story is being told.
source www.imdb.com/title/tt1352824/
Actually the story of Chloe is so stupid it is worth being told in a few sentences. Suppose you are a successful gynecologist and you suspect that your husband of at least 20 years cheats on you. What is more natural than hiring a hooker to check on his behavior and tell you in details how she makes ‘progress’ in the relation with the husbie? When you are told that the inevitable happened you start being attracted by the hooker, or maybe it’s just revenge, or curiosity, but soon you will end by you cheating on your husband with her. And this is not all but I will spare the rest. Chloe not being the only strange relationship film coming from Northern border, the only question it arises to me is are really these Canadian such disturbed personalities, when it comes to intimate and family relations? If yes, I must have met the wrong and not-interesting Canadians during all my life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWLEz-1VzSk
(video source VISO trailers)
The lead actors do their best but they seem all a little bit uncomfortable with the story and their roles. Julian Moore of all has the most difficult task, as she needs to give some credibility to the most unbelievable relationship story – she is brave and succeeds up to the point of making sense of her relationship with Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) whose motivations we never find out excepting the basic fact that she is really a Bad Girl. Egoyan makes at some point a directorial mistake which taking into account his talent I cannot believe to be unintentional, filming imagined scenes as a real ones – I call this cheating on audiences and I did not like it. There is a final twist that is supposed to create a persistent feeling of uneasiness in the audiences, but this feeling actually starts much earlier and for the wrong reasons.