Chloe

Dude, Atom Egoyan, what the hell? I'm not going to talk about the careful, inspired use of space as an index of character, or the soaring architectural harmonics, or the apt casting, shrewd scoring, extraordinary and novel set designing and costuming, or even the brave, mercurial street rhythms and sound control. Why? Because the more attention I paid to the film's craftsmanship, and the more I learned about the hard work that went in its execution, the more I despised the finished product. Egoyan is known and celebrated for his daring, his elan, his refusal to privilege custom over novelty or safety over loveliness. I actually can't think of a director more straightforwardly, so deliberately responsible. Which is why I'm so disappointed that he allowed Chloe, which should be a masterpiece, another Exotica, to degenerate into the pop-shop melodrama that I, unfortunately, waited so many months to see. I could have experienced this anger already and moved on to the next abusable project.

These are the sort of movies that bomb-blast my brain: exquisitely wrought, painfully planned works that stink. How am I supposed to react? I appreciate the movie's formal intelligence, its wit, its command of its materials, but the appalling lapses in taste and failures of overall aesthetic judgment leave me speechless. How can such extremes define the boundaries of a single object? The image brings to mind God's circle, which the cardinal Nicholas Cusanus memorably concluded to have a center that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere. (The paradox likely precedes Cusanus, to whom Giordano Bruno attributes it.) Chloe is like some mystical Pythagorean solid whose geometrical truth can be measured and expressed rationally but whose ultimate reality is to be found nowhere on Earth.

Let me try a more direct criticism: Chloe begins like a livelier Speaking Parts and ends like Fatal fucking Attraction. Yes, I infixed a title. That's how disappointed I am. No movie, not even Andrei Rublev, earns a death scene in which a beautiful, angelic young woman gently floats to the ground from a second story window like a vision in a dream or a piece of paper. It's simply an impossible maneuver. I don't care if the movie is Snow White and she's floating into the arms of her loving prince (is there a prince in that story?). It still doesn't work. People shouldn't float, especially to their deaths.

The movie labors other problems into cinematic stillbirths as well, but I'll leave those tidy little should-have-been-abortions for you to deliver. Healthy regrets, I guess. C

Slothrop: Does this movie not have a school girl stripping to Leonard Cohen? No wonder it blows chunks. D and clearly no reason to see it.

Koko: No, but it does have lesbians, kind of, if that helps.