Here's a terrible early review from The New Yorker. I think he's on to something, though: Paris just seems to be a more appropriate setting for sexual intrigue than Toronto in January.
Mystery Women
Anthony Lane
March 21, 2010
As the festivity of the Winter Olympics dies away, what is the next extravaganza that Canada has to offer? Welcome to “Chloe,” in which a Toronto-based gynecologist has a lesbian affair with a prostitute whom she suspects of having slept with her husband. If that isn’t a winter sport, I don’t know what is. Not unlike snowboard cross, perhaps, except that these contestants have lunchtime sex in hotels instead of knocking each other helmet first into the slush.
David (Liam Neeson) misses a surprise birthday party thrown for him by his wife, Catherine (Julianne Moore), who doesn’t realize that, for most men, surprise parties are slightly less enjoyable than surprise dentistry. She thinks that he was otherwise engaged, and, in a fit of inquisitive revenge, pays a call girl named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to befriend and tempt him. The befriending gets out of control, but Catherine is so aroused by firsthand accounts of it that she, too, falls into Chloe’s embrace. The movie—directed by Atom Egoyan, who should know better—is closely adapted from “Nathalie,” a French film of 2004, with Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart, but what seemed like standard practice for Parisians comes across here as unsmiling porno-farce. Even the throbbing score, by Mychael Danna, sounds unwittingly risible, and there were times—I refer you to David’s first, salivating gaze at Chloe across a coffee shop—when I felt that we could be watching one of those soft-core cable dramas starring the redoubtable Shannon Tweed, with titles like “Night Raptures IV” or “Executive Sensations.” Wait, if you must, for the DVD, although even then, once you’ve heard the hooker say, “I try and find something to love in everybody,” there is a strong case that “Chloe” should be pulled from your Erotica shelf and moved to Science Fiction.
