You know how you get those dodgy stalls selling knock-off perfumes which sound a bit like the original ("'Methadone', luv? It's just like 'Opium'")? Well Chloe – which is also the name of a perfume – is a knock-off of an earlier film, a French number called Nathalie, from 2003.
This remake's written by Erin Cressida Wilson, who also penned indie hit Secretary; and Canadian-Armenian indie darling Atom Egoyan directs – or atomises – it. Oh, and it's produced by Ivan Reitman, responsible for My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Space Jam. Uh Houston? We may have a problem. But all in good time.
Egoyan's known for his chilly, Pinterish dramas, often shot through with dark eroticism. Brains for balls. Exotica, for example, might be set in a strip club, but it's the equivalent of having a lap dancer subject you to intense psychoanalysis for nearly two hours. And for the first half hour, Chloe feels like the sort of sophisticated psychosexual thriller which, back in the day, you can easily imagine being molested in a verbal ménage a trois by Paulin, Parsons and Pearson on the Late Review.
Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a flinty, sexually-frustrated gynaecologist married to Liam Neeson's handsome music lecturer, whose adoring young female students hang off his every crotchet. After Catherine suspects him of playing hide the flute, she hires the eponymous call girl (Amanda Seyfried, with a face like a Disney goldfish) to flirt with him and report back. You would, wouldn't you. And as Chloe relates their encounters in increasingly forensic detail ("We met in the park again, this time he didn't bring sandwiches") to an increasingly turned-on Catherine, the hunter becomes voyeur, then prey. Turns out there's something missing from both their lives that can't be filled by marathon sessions of Come Dine with Me.
Yet just as there's a single defining moment in every doomed relationship when the blinkers finally fall off, you can practically set your watch at the point this slides into Single White-silliness, then absurdity, then hysteria, with a plot twist that comes galumphing in iron boots over the hill booming "How may I disappoint you today?"
Moore's much the best thing in this, but writhes haplessly within the trashy constraints of the B-movie script. Chloe proves once again that jumping into bed with Hollywood producers only leaves art-house directors with a bad taste in the mouth and an embarrassing little rash in the morning.
This remake's written by Erin Cressida Wilson, who also penned indie hit Secretary; and Canadian-Armenian indie darling Atom Egoyan directs – or atomises – it. Oh, and it's produced by Ivan Reitman, responsible for My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Space Jam. Uh Houston? We may have a problem. But all in good time.
Egoyan's known for his chilly, Pinterish dramas, often shot through with dark eroticism. Brains for balls. Exotica, for example, might be set in a strip club, but it's the equivalent of having a lap dancer subject you to intense psychoanalysis for nearly two hours. And for the first half hour, Chloe feels like the sort of sophisticated psychosexual thriller which, back in the day, you can easily imagine being molested in a verbal ménage a trois by Paulin, Parsons and Pearson on the Late Review.
Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a flinty, sexually-frustrated gynaecologist married to Liam Neeson's handsome music lecturer, whose adoring young female students hang off his every crotchet. After Catherine suspects him of playing hide the flute, she hires the eponymous call girl (Amanda Seyfried, with a face like a Disney goldfish) to flirt with him and report back. You would, wouldn't you. And as Chloe relates their encounters in increasingly forensic detail ("We met in the park again, this time he didn't bring sandwiches") to an increasingly turned-on Catherine, the hunter becomes voyeur, then prey. Turns out there's something missing from both their lives that can't be filled by marathon sessions of Come Dine with Me.
Yet just as there's a single defining moment in every doomed relationship when the blinkers finally fall off, you can practically set your watch at the point this slides into Single White-silliness, then absurdity, then hysteria, with a plot twist that comes galumphing in iron boots over the hill booming "How may I disappoint you today?"
Moore's much the best thing in this, but writhes haplessly within the trashy constraints of the B-movie script. Chloe proves once again that jumping into bed with Hollywood producers only leaves art-house directors with a bad taste in the mouth and an embarrassing little rash in the morning.