Atom Egoyan's "Chloe'

Among contemporary filmmakers, Atom Egoyan possesses a reliably jaundiced eye for the human condition. He's less aggressive about it than Roman Polanski, but that makes the moral puzzles he assembles often more interesting. Egoyan's latest example is Chloe, a remake, or perhaps better say a re-envisioning, of Anne Fontane's Nathalie.

Not only filmed in Toronto, the stand-in city for a thousand American films, but actually set there, Chloe is a sex triangle featuring a successful middle-aged couple, David (Liam Neeson) and Catherine (Julianne Moore), and the free-lance prostitute Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) who enters their lives. David is a music professor, popular with his young students, and Catherine a gynecologist whose own nether regions aren't receiving much attention. When Catherine becomes suspicious that David is having an affair, she hires Chloe to tempt him and report the results.

Covert dominatrix

It's Chloe we meet first, going about her trysts and telling us in voice-over how intuitive she is about finding and servicing her clients' hot spots. There's an odd, almost schizoid quality to her narrative, because although she confesses to doing things she'd rather not, she nonetheless clings to the conviction that her experiences are empowering.

Chloe seems to see herself as a covert dominatrix, exploiting others' fantasies to control their most intimate pleasures. What we wonder, however, is whether she has any core identity of her own.

If this sounds a bit reminiscent of Fatal Attraction, it is, except that the object of Chloe's own desire turns out to be not David but Catherine. As Chloe describes her seduction of David to Catherine— offering herself as a surrogate who has touched the husband who no longer touches his wife— we are ourselves being seduced by what the camera unfolds for us of Chloe's tale.

If Egoyan wishes to emphasize the power of the film image to create reality, he certainly succeeds, and it's only well along that the viewer begins to ask what real information there is to go on— since, apart from Catherine's purchase of Chloe's services and Chloe's apparent obsession with Catherine, the film provides no direct verification of anything we "see." Catherine infers David's affair from a text message that, although suspicious, is susceptible of more than one interpretation; she knows about his seduction by Chloe only from Chloe's own description of it. When Catherine finally confronts David, she's in for a shock.

Beyond Fatal Attraction

On one level, Chloe is a film about the woe that is in marriage, something Fatal Attraction only hints at. On another, it's not only about home invasion but identity theft. Chloe doesn't merely wish to latch onto Catherine; she wants to become her, to love her to death. In turn, that urge compels Catherine to discover who she really is herself.

It's a bit difficult to judge who Chloe's damaged victim is: the lonely, vulnerable wife or the waiflike temptress. But clearly there can be only one survivor.

The plot suffers from some loose ends, as well as a prop that's used to excess, dramatically and symbolically. Mychael Danna's score is top-heavy. But the script is literate— a cautionary tale for adults— and Egoyan's camera is a wily trickster: Only at the end, for example, do we realize how often we've seen Catherine shot from behind— that is, with her face averted— while Chloe is almost always shown head-on.

Julianne Moore is, as always, a superbly intelligent actress, and Liam Neeson, hawk-faced and basset-eyed, is a study in baffled masculinity. The newcomer Amanda Seyfried manages to look pleading and commanding at the same time, her eyes the empty pools of favor. With so much technical wizardry in the service of infantile drivel in today's cinema, it's refreshing to see an old hand deal the cards of human evil anew.