Convention triumphs over the unexpectedly exposed and terrifying truth of the self in Atom Egoyan's contemporary marriage mystery. A female gynecologist—a professional trained to look inside the bodies of women to reveal their truth, and perhaps something of their essence—suspects her husband of infidelity. She hires a Lolita look-alike call girl to entice her husband to determine his betrayal tendencies. The husband, a college instructor, and flirt, denies aging by intentionally missing his flight to home on his birthday, thwarting his wife's surprise birthday party arrangements. Their relationship has died—he now devotes himself to teaching, and is apathetic about the burned-out marital passion; she walks around in frustration, and flails about in response to her ineffectual attempts to her marriage emptiness. While it appears the husband is at least getting his physical needs met, the couple's mentally ill teenage son is obviously the only one in this upper middle class bare semblance of a family getting any for sure. His mother, jealous of her son's liaisons, but actually confronted by her own passionless life by his success, fails to connect, too, with the other familial male —her son. This woman, apparently successful at discerning the nature, or at least the core female health of her professional clients, has lost the capacity to know herself, and how to know herself. The prostitute reports her 'findings' face-to-face to the wife, which arouses her. The young woman, played effectively with big blue eyes and mouthy nuance by Amanda Siegfried, notes the wife's subtle arousal signals. The wife surprises herself with her responses to the descriptive tales of liaison, but the girl's got an unrevealed plan. The wife comes to the discovery of her true sexual nature, but without revealing the whys of her rejection of it, falls back to conventionality. The movie's ending cops out to the truth, revealing once again Hollywood's immense incapacity for encouraging honest living, or at least genuine acknowledgment of the truth, and the cost of its ignorance. © Bruce Stern, April 2010
Review of Chloe
