Chloe

I had watched some of Atom Egoyan’s earlier works before I went to see Chloe. His “Family viewing” was very hard to watch. It was slow and poorly edited, and bared every characteristic of ultra-low budget films. In fact, I didn’t finish watching it. I remember watching “Sweet Thereafter” a few years ago. It was a good film, although the end of the film was a little too abstract for my taste.

Seeing “Chloe” was a good experience, although I wouldn’t say I totally loved the movie. It was an art film, fully financed by French production company Studio Canal. On the Internet it was said that the film company had already made all the money back through international sales before the US release. It was encouraging to know that, because the film has a style that I strongly identify with, in spite of quite a few things in the plot that seemed forced and even absurd to me.

The film tells the story of Kathryn, a middle-aged doctor whose insecurity in her sextuality compels her to test her husband’s loyalty by hiring a hooker to seduce him, only to find herself in the middle of an emotional turmoil. Chloe, the hooker Kathryn hires, takes on the job and lies to her about all the details of her sexual encounters with the husband, eventually seduces her client and it is revealed at the end that her infatuation with Kathryn is the reason for she went through.

The film has a lyrical tone throughout that I find very familiar to the films I have made, as well as its dark dramatic feel. It’s also a film that I find encouraging because the strength of the actors’ performances carried many heavy moments and made them work without feeling melodramatic. The reason I think those moments are potentially melodramatic is because most of the characters lacked logical motivations, or when they did have motivations, I felt they were not strong enough. Chloe's infatuation with Kathryn doesn't seem to have been established strong enough to make her action in the end believable. As cliche as most Hollywood movies are, they do a good job providing the reasons for their characters' actions. For instance, in "Single White Female", Jennifer Jason Leigh's character's behavior is justified by her guilt and pain over the loss of her twin sister. In Chloe, we don't see a strong justification for Chloe. Is it because she is fed up with having sex with men that makes her helplessly fall in love with Kathryn? We don't know.

Also Kathryn’s decision to hire Chloe to seduce her husband seems a little random. What triggers that idea in her? I don’t even remember the scene in which she approaches Chloe. There needs to be an incident, or a character trait that makes her decision logical. But at the same time I understand the story is about how she gets emotionally wrecked because of her decision, and we can't afford to spend too much time at the beginning to see how she comes up with that decision.

The end of the film, where Chloe seems to commit suicide, again shows the damage of lack of justification of her behavior can do to a movie. I actually heard people laughing at the moment. It was a scary and understandable scene where Chloe, after failing to make Kathryn love her, turns to her son because of the resemblance between the two, but her committing suicide after she is rejected? That was too much for me.

Maybe this is the difference between an art film and a commercial film. In an art film, you don't have to worry too much about the logic. What matters is the depiction of the emotion, and how it makes us feel. But I think it's also a sign of sloppiness. A good piece of work, again, should make us believe the characters first, and then we will be able to feel the emotional impact.