Filmikaze!

By: Atom Egoyan (director), Erin Cressida Wilson (screenplay), Anne Fontaine (motion picture “Nathalie”)

Starring: Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried

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

There should be something refreshing about a movie like Chloe, that makes the effort to shunt the male lead aside and focus on the women characters instead, especially when it takes the extra step and incorporates lesbian themes. This isn’t something we often see in films with stars as big as Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. The trouble with Chloe, though, is that the nature of its plot completely subverts any feminist efforts it might have been seeking to achieve.

Case in point: Lesbianism first represented as consensual but then made into the deft manipulations of a mentally ill, Single White Female-type antagonist. Furthermore, despite the male lead only being shown in a peripheral sense, the entire movie is about this man—His perceived infidelity, his wife’s love for him, and ultimately, his redemption. Even when the two female leads are intimate, it is still all about this man.

The end is abrupt and the point of the thing ambiguous. It’s obvious that there’s supposed to be a moral to the story, but I have no idea what it was. “It’s okay to love lesbians as long as they’re dead”? I’m confused, a little insulted and quite disappointed. Chloe had the makings of a decent film, but squandered them.