AN EROTIC THRILLER GETS THE EGOYAN TOUCH
By Michael Redd, Canwest News Service
Vancouver Sun, BC
-guide/erotic+thriller+gets+Egoyan+touch/2719837/s tory.html
March 24 2010
Canada
Despite woman-on-woman sex scene, director says latest film Chloe is
chiefly a study of a marriage
For a guy reputed to be a "cerebral" filmmaker, Atom Egoyan has a
sense of humour some might find surprising.
It erupts over coffee in Victoria, where the director is taking a
breather before resuming a press tour for Chloe, his new erotic drama
that opens nationwide on Friday.
Victoria-raised Egoyan, 49, laughs as he recalls a surreal experience
at the Guadalajara Film Festival. A showing of Next of Kin, his 1984
drama about a troubled young man who impersonates an Armenian couple’s
long-lost son, was planned as part of a retrospective, but the 1989
vigilante action flick of the same name was featured by mistake.
"It seemed so incongruous. It said my first film was Next of Kin with
Patrick Swayze," he says, laughing. "They programmed that movie,
so anyone who saw it would have thought the rest of my career went
downhill from there."
Egoyan has grown accustomed to being misperceived, as when many assumed
his mournful 1993 drama Exotica was an exploitative sex flick because
much of its action was set in a Toronto strip club.
No wonder Egoyan is feeling some deja vu as Sony Pictures Classics
rolls out Chloe. His sleek, sexy and well-acted reinvention of
Anne Fontaine’s 2003 French film Nathalie focuses on the unsettling
relationship between Catherine (Julianne Moore), a wealthy middle-aged
gynecologist, and Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), the sexy young escort she
hires to seduce her husband (Liam Neeson) and test his fidelity.
Although Egoyan describes it as a drama about the erotic lives of
its needy antagonists, albeit with thriller ingredients, Chloe —
termed "a Sapphic fatal attraction" by London’s Daily Telegraph,
likely because of a sex scene between Catherine and Chloe — is being
marketed as an erotic thriller.
"It’s very difficult these days to market something as a drama," says
Egoyan, who was hired by Canadian producer Ivan Reitman. "There’s
the film and there’s the marketing of it, and what within the film
is a concession to how you sell it?"
Egoyan, who directed from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson,
says Chloe is chiefly a study of a marriage.
"It’s about what happens in relationships after a long period of time.
How do you keep an erotic fantasy with someone you know so well? How
do you reinvent that?" says Egoyan, noting it isn’t a script he could
have written himself.
"I cannot write a story that goes from point A to B," he says. "It’s
just not in me."
Still, he managed to incorporate his style and persuaded Reitman to
let him shoot in Toronto instead of San Francisco.
"One of the arguments I made to Ivan was Toronto kind of whores
itself," he says. "It plays a prostitute to all these different
cities it pretends to be but is not, like Chicago or New York. So it’s
interesting it’s set in a place that, in most people’s imaginations,
is not even on the map."
It was the dynamics of the women’s relationship that sold him, he says.
"It’s this clash of two women with competing structures and ways of
creating a fantasy about each other," he says.
"Chloe sleeps with these men in these rooms and feels somewhat
diminished by that, and suddenly she tells what happens in these rooms
to a respectable, gorgeous older woman who listens to these stories
and endows them with a certain power. For Catherine, this person is
a surrogate youthful object she can’t be any more."
While Egoyan is aware some might view the woman-on-woman sex scene
as gratuitous, he insists it isn’t.
"It’s not just about sexual pleasure. There are a lot of other things
they’re trying to traverse," he says. "What I’m interested in is what’s
going on in these women’s minds as they’re colliding into each other."
He says it helped that he got to work with a top-shelf cast.
"Working with Amanda was great," said Egoyan, who cast Seyfried
before Mamma Mia made her a star. "There was absolute trust and she
was great with Julie. They were very compatible."
After shooting Adoration and Chloe back to back, he says he’s ready
for a break.
"I know from experience after Exotica this could be a year of just
meeting people, spending time in L.A. and treading water," says Egoyan.