Directed by Toronto New Wave director Atom Egoyan, Chloe is a loose remake of the French erotic thriller Natalie… (2003) and tells the story of Catherine, a midtown gynecologist who suspects her husband, David, a professor, of conducting affairs with his students. In a bid to test their marriage, Catherine recruits Chloe, an alluring young call girl, to seduce David and report back any betrayals. As Catherine’s plan unfolds, so too do her feelings for her hired hand, a development that destabilizes her pretensions about sex and trust. An interesting premise, one undermined by a disappointing final act which sees the couple happily reunited and the young call girl, no longer of use, thrown from a window to her death. Despite the unimaginative ending, Chloe remains intriguing to me because it offers speculation about the sex lives of the city’s straight white professional elite, a class I’ve occasionally encountered but of which I’m not a part. I’ve always wondered what happens, or what might be happening, during stolen lunch breaks at the Royal York, the Windsor Arms, or when nothing else is available, the Best Western Primrose Hotel. Chloe provides some reasonable guesses, and while I would’ve preferred a more ambiguous outcome, where better to set a moralizing tale of marital woes than a city so chaste and rule-abiding that its nickname is Toronto the Good.
Chloe stars Julianne Moore as Catherine, a woman so dissatisfied in her marriage that she describes an orgasm to one of her patients as nothing more than “a series of muscle contractions.” This isn’t Moore’s first time playing a tightly wound wife—her roles in Far From Heaven (2002), The Hours (2002), Gloria Bell (2018), and more recently May December (2023) might all be considered variations on a theme. In Chloe, she takes that well-developed archetype and inflects it with the repressed pragmatism of a true Torontonian WASP. (When Chloe admits to an affair with David, Catherine cooly advises her to get an STI test before returning home to masturbate in the shower.) Starring opposite Moore is Liam Neeson, whose weathered expression and sad blue eyes make him all the more convincing as a charmingly pathetic English professor susceptible to student flirtation. On the wall of Catherine’s office is a framed photo of her and David from an article in Toronto Life, a charmless yuppy rag that publishes out-of-touch clickbait with headlines like We Bought a Crack House and How Private School Can Make Financial Sense. The headline of Catherine and David’s feature reads Balancing Work and Family: Meet One Toronto Couple Who Seems to Have Achieved a Peaceful Equilibrium. Of course it’s a fake article, but Moore and Neeson are so natural in their roles that I almost believed it was real.
The other blue eyes in Chloe, this pair wide and youthful, belong to the movie’s titular character, played by Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried’s eyes are her signature, a tool she uses to portray women who may or may not be smarter than they appear, such as the lovably ditzy Karen Smith in Mean Girls (2004), or the coldly ambitious Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout (2022). In Chloe, Seyfried deploys her baby blues to embody a character so hungry for love that she attempts to seduce an entire family. Seyfried handles this lovesick performance with elegance, moving from meek to self-assured to desperate with nothing more than the bat of a lash. At TIFF this year Egoyan premiered Seven Veils (2023), a psychodrama starring Seyfried as a theater director tasked to mount the opera Salome. I’ve yet to see it, but if Chloe is any indication, it’s an actor-director pairing to look forward to.
I’ve been a girl like Chloe, recklessly clinging to a love that never existed, and who can blame me? Toronto isn’t exactly the easiest city in which to fall in love. The city’s guarded culture can send even the most confident single into a relapse of wanting, each sterile and networky date leaving much to be desired by the end of the night. Egoyan’s version of the city is cold and austere in a way I find comforting perhaps for no reason other than I grew up here. He sets the movie almost entirely in winter, freezing the city in time like a snow globe. Consider, for instance, the brief shot of Amanda Seyfried on the phone outside the Art Gallery of Ontario. Seyfried stands across the street from the gallery, with its self-consciously contemporary glass exterior, a bronze blob to the building’s left. The gallery’s impenetrable facade, designed by Frank Gehry, was unveiled in 2008, and the blob, Henry Moore’s Two Large Forms, was installed on the corner of Dundas and McCaul in the early 70s and then relocated to the nearby Grange Park in 2017. In one shot, Egoyan offers a glimpse inside an aloof and ever-changing city. If Chloe isn’t the only movie to capture these two local landmarks together in a single frame, it’s certainly the most well-known.
"I’ve been a girl like Chloe, recklessly clinging to a love that never existed, and who can blame me? Toronto isn’t exactly the easiest city in which to fall in love."
It seems relevant to mention here that Two Large Forms, a public artwork frequently repurposed as a jungle gym, is often read as an abstract representation of two pelvic bones mid-coitus. This is just one of several moments in which Chloe nods to the sexual politics particular to my hometown. It’s a Toronto I recognized as soon as I saw it, detached, serious, and sprinkled with pockets of discreet intimacy: a coy glance between strangers at Cafe Diplomatico; a hand on a thigh in a booth at the Rivoli; a belt buckle undone in the humid heat of Allan Gardens. What kind of illicit affairs transpire during happy hour at the Royal York, or catered parties in midtown? Perhaps I’ll never know for sure, but what a thrill to see it on screen.
Directed by Toronto New Wave director Atom Egoyan, Chloe is a loose remake of the French erotic thriller Natalie… (2003) and tells the story of Catherine, a midtown gynecologist who suspects her husband, David, a professor, of conducting affairs with his students. In a bid to test their marriage, Catherine recruits Chloe, an alluring young call girl, to seduce David and report back any betrayals. As Catherine’s plan unfolds, so too do her feelings for her hired hand, a development that destabilizes her pretensions about sex and trust. An interesting premise, one undermined by a disappointing final act which sees the couple happily reunited and the young call girl, no longer of use, thrown from a window to her death. Despite the unimaginative ending, Chloe remains intriguing to me because it offers speculation about the sex lives of the city’s straight white professional elite, a class I’ve occasionally encountered but of which I’m not a part. I’ve always wondered what happens, or what might be happening, during stolen lunch breaks at the Royal York, the Windsor Arms, or when nothing else is available, the Best Western Primrose Hotel. Chloe provides some reasonable guesses, and while I would’ve preferred a more ambiguous outcome, where better to set a moralizing tale of marital woes than a city so chaste and rule-abiding that its nickname is Toronto the Good.
Chloe stars Julianne Moore as Catherine, a woman so dissatisfied in her marriage that she describes an orgasm to one of her patients as nothing more than “a series of muscle contractions.” This isn’t Moore’s first time playing a tightly wound wife—her roles in Far From Heaven (2002), The Hours (2002), Gloria Bell (2018), and more recently May December (2023) might all be considered variations on a theme. In Chloe, she takes that well-developed archetype and inflects it with the repressed pragmatism of a true Torontonian WASP. (When Chloe admits to an affair with David, Catherine cooly advises her to get an STI test before returning home to masturbate in the shower.) Starring opposite Moore is Liam Neeson, whose weathered expression and sad blue eyes make him all the more convincing as a charmingly pathetic English professor susceptible to student flirtation. On the wall of Catherine’s office is a framed photo of her and David from an article in Toronto Life, a charmless yuppy rag that publishes out-of-touch clickbait with headlines like We Bought a Crack House and How Private School Can Make Financial Sense. The headline of Catherine and David’s feature reads Balancing Work and Family: Meet One Toronto Couple Who Seems to Have Achieved a Peaceful Equilibrium. Of course it’s a fake article, but Moore and Neeson are so natural in their roles that I almost believed it was real.
The other blue eyes in Chloe, this pair wide and youthful, belong to the movie’s titular character, played by Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried’s eyes are her signature, a tool she uses to portray women who may or may not be smarter than they appear, such as the lovably ditzy Karen Smith in Mean Girls (2004), or the coldly ambitious Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout (2022). In Chloe, Seyfried deploys her baby blues to embody a character so hungry for love that she attempts to seduce an entire family. Seyfried handles this lovesick performance with elegance, moving from meek to self-assured to desperate with nothing more than the bat of a lash. At TIFF this year Egoyan premiered Seven Veils (2023), a psychodrama starring Seyfried as a theater director tasked to mount the opera Salome. I’ve yet to see it, but if Chloe is any indication, it’s an actor-director pairing to look forward to.
I’ve been a girl like Chloe, recklessly clinging to a love that never existed, and who can blame me? Toronto isn’t exactly the easiest city in which to fall in love. The city’s guarded culture can send even the most confident single into a relapse of wanting, each sterile and networky date leaving much to be desired by the end of the night. Egoyan’s version of the city is cold and austere in a way I find comforting perhaps for no reason other than I grew up here. He sets the movie almost entirely in winter, freezing the city in time like a snow globe. Consider, for instance, the brief shot of Amanda Seyfried on the phone outside the Art Gallery of Ontario. Seyfried stands across the street from the gallery, with its self-consciously contemporary glass exterior, a bronze blob to the building’s left. The gallery’s impenetrable facade, designed by Frank Gehry, was unveiled in 2008, and the blob, Henry Moore’s Two Large Forms, was installed on the corner of Dundas and McCaul in the early 70s and then relocated to the nearby Grange Park in 2017. In one shot, Egoyan offers a glimpse inside an aloof and ever-changing city. If Chloe isn’t the only movie to capture these two local landmarks together in a single frame, it’s certainly the most well-known.
"I’ve been a girl like Chloe, recklessly clinging to a love that never existed, and who can blame me? Toronto isn’t exactly the easiest city in which to fall in love."
It seems relevant to mention here that Two Large Forms, a public artwork frequently repurposed as a jungle gym, is often read as an abstract representation of two pelvic bones mid-coitus. This is just one of several moments in which Chloe nods to the sexual politics particular to my hometown. It’s a Toronto I recognized as soon as I saw it, detached, serious, and sprinkled with pockets of discreet intimacy: a coy glance between strangers at Cafe Diplomatico; a hand on a thigh in a booth at the Rivoli; a belt buckle undone in the humid heat of Allan Gardens. What kind of illicit affairs transpire during happy hour at the Royal York, or catered parties in midtown? Perhaps I’ll never know for sure, but what a thrill to see it on screen.
