manages a successful career while also appearing to be the perfect wife
and mother (effortlessly and in heels, nonetheless). David is a
renowned lecturer whose work frequently takes him out of town.
From
as she readies a surprise birthday party at their immaculate, expansive
home to let her know that he has missed the only flight back to
suspicions become aroused and it is at precisely this point where
Canadian director Atom Egoyan is able to draw spectators into the
tangled web of miscommunication, deceit and intrigue hook, line and
sinker. Add in the slightly sinister, ghostly appearance of a young
call girl named Chloe (
bravely against type) and the lines that Egoyan sketches become the
perfect outline for a bold deconstruction of the old trope of “the
perfect family.”
As “Chloe” centers on the kind of multi-faceted
female protagonist that is rarely glimpsed in contemporary
English-language filmmaking, it is no surprise to see Moore cast in the
part. She has become one of the most inventive actresses working today,
again challenging conventional, conservative attitudes about sex.
Creating indelible characters with, shall we say, unique erotic lives
in trailblazing, original films such as “Boogie Nights,” “The End of
the Affair” and “Savage Grace,” and working alongside auteurs such as
has earned Moore a reputation for being the go-to actress when it comes
to the depiction of complicated maternal struggle, challenging female
sexuality and intense emotional intricacy.
Familial relationships are a recurring theme in
Egoyan’s filmography as well, with such standouts as “Exotica,” “The
Sweet Hereafter” (which earned him an Oscar nomination for best
director) and “Felicia’s Journey” dissecting the often dangerous,
bruised tissues that bind families — both biological and chosen —
together, particularly in delicate or unusual situations. With “Chloe,”
the director’s reverence for classic
nest syndrome and new carnal desires. The result is a slick, composed
meditation on marriage, success, deception and family ties that
provides Moore with a welcome chance to shine in a lead role, which she
knocks out of the park as is her usual custom.
Egoyan spoke in
film criticism and why there is more to film history than just “Star
Wars.”
Q. Strong, surprising female characters have been a tradition in your films. Why is this important to you?
A. When I read this particular script, it seemed
like an amazing story, because any other tale I had ever encountered
about someone testing the fideilty their spouse, it is usually a man
testing the fidelity of the wife. That goes from “Cymbeline” and
It’s a common thread, but it is usually the men testing the fidelity of
their lovers. In this case, to have a woman testing the fidelity of her
husband seemed unusual. It really was unusual have the film center
around these two strong, complex women with competing fanatasies of who
the other might be. Then to have the husband play the traditional
“wife” role in the film, that was, to me, somehow very different.
Q. What do you think are the biggest mistakes that a director can make when depicting sex for the screen?
A. To forget that it’s first and foremost of the
mind. That it’s basically two people who have all sorts of histories
racing throught their minds. It’s an essential part of our make-up.
It’s not something to compartmentalize outside of our day to day lives,
it is something that is with us all the time. It’s part of our sense of
who we are. People have been asking about these scenes in the film and
they are treated as dramatic scenes. There’s a continuity between all
the other material and those scenes and so the actors feel that
connection, I think as we all need to be connected to our sexual
selves. It’s not outside of who we ever are.
Q. What’s the most surprising thing about working with an actor like
A. That she’s capable of detailing the most obscure
or mysterious nuance you could think of. Her face is both iconographic
yet open to surprise. She’s able to seem at once completely accessible
yet hidden and that’s an incredible alchemy. She’s playing a character
that starts off by saying “an orgasm is a series of muscle
contractions, there’s nothing mysterious or complicated about it,” and
you still kind of feel like you’re with her, which is just kind of odd.
But she can pull that off. It’s funny, from the moment I saw her in
“Vanya on
thought “this is an extraordinary instrument.” You know? If I can be
that cold. That’s what actors have and she has this really amazing
presence — at once accessible and complex, and full of ambiguity.
Q. You’ve taught at the
A. Yes, it was a very specific course, called
“Transgressions” and it was basically trying to find links between the
parameters of different art forms like visual arts, music, drama,
cinema. It was a course geared towards really selected graduate
students who were interested in making those links. I am a huge opera
buff and I direct opera. It was really concentrating on how opera is a
form that connects all of these different arts. It was fun. It’s a
tough thing to pull off when you’re trying to keep a career. I was
teaching at the
matter and it was so great to be back. They were setting up a graduate
school of cinema, so I set up a scholarship for graduate students.
Q. What’s the importance of a continuing education in cinema studies, do you think?
A. Well, it goes without saying: it is the major art
form of our time. It alarms me sometimes that so much film history in
people’s imaginations begins with “Star Wars” or perhaps now even later
than that. For the next generation it will probably be “Lord of the
Rings.” There’s a very rich history of cinema that people don’t
understand or have access to and it is important to keep a level of
scholarship which is able to keep the language of those earlier films
alive and present. As the industry goes through these major revolutions
we have to understand the importance of silent cinema, the importance
of the early experiments in sound, we have to understand all of these
different phases that cinema has gone through as an art form and keep
it as rigorous a study as we apply to music or painting or any other
art form.
Q. In “Chloe,” Amanda says “I hate the Internet.” I
was wondering what your thoughts are on film criticism now that the
Internet has changed it so much?
A. It’s an amazing, amazing opportunity to allow
people to spend as much time as they need to discuss a film and to
present the point of view of a film without any restriction in terms of
word count. The problem is that we’ve lost the sense of a central kind
of authority. Maybe that’s good, but it’s also sad because we don’t
have a defining person that we wait to interpret the film for us, it’s
kind of becoming more and more a group or sort of overall consensus.
While that’s great for the democratization process, it makes it more
difficult for challenging marginal work to find its audience if no one
is going to particularly shepherd it through to the public. It’s funny,
I was just reading a book about early
Q. What are the top films every cinephile should see?
A. “Vertigo” is right up there. “The Godfather” is
right up there. “8 1/2” by Fellini for me is up there. Some of the
other ones for me are a bit more obscure. I do think “Citizen Kane”
deserves its reputation.
Q. Continuing with the thread of classic
A. This is a melodrama and it is different from my
other movies in that way. Melodrama is about unfiltered access to
emotion and to make melodrama work, it has to be really well performed.
Obviously, I am a huge fan of
we’re not doing that sort of a film, but it just seems to me that we
had three performers who could pull off what is becoming really
difficult, which is a classic melodrama. I happened to win the Douglas
Sirk award last year from the
was an interesting moment, when I had this trophy, I thought “OK, this
gives now me license to do the most Sirkian movie I have done yet
…”(laughs)
Q. And now a nerdy filmmaking technique question: I enjoyed the point of view you chose when
gets the pivotal call from David in the beginning that sets up the
story. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that scene and
maybe about why you chose this particular angle?
A. Well, again, one of the attractions of this house
was that it afforded these angles where characters watched one another
through glass and they’re aware of being observed. As someone who has
designed this house as a weird sort of observation deck on which to
observe her family, it’s funny that suddenly it turns against
in that scene and everyone at the party is suddenly watching her. So, I
think it kind of creates this compression of all the things she is
feeling in terms of her life slipping away.
Q. I found
A. Really important. It’s about a woman who is
feeling like she is disappearing who once felt that she was more
attractive to her husband. She even says that she does not feel like
she is there. That’s terrifying. Similarly, because of this image she
has of her husband as becoming more and more attractive (as he ages)
and being surrounded by all of these fawning young students, she kind
of presupposes that he doesn’t need to hear from her that he is
attractive. That’s also really important.
Q. I was really interested in the ideas on trust
that you present in “Chloe.” Not even really so much about trust, but
about grand deceptions. How do you think one can explore mystery in a
long-term relationship without resorting to being secretive?
A. Oh God! If I had the answer to that … (laughs)
I just think that sometimes relationships are kind of reinvented at
moments when you least expect them to. No one knows. It is just the
most mysterious thing. At a certain point in a long-term relationship
you have to address that you have changed from the person you were when
you met. Your sexual needs have changed. Your emotional needs have
changed. The relative position you have with each other has been
fundamentally altered by experiences that life throws at you, so you
can’t just let that go. I think a lot of couples do let that go. Then
the question becomes “What do you do?”
And people have all different solutions and I think
anything goes in a marriage, you know gay, straight, whatever. Whatever
it takes, people have all sorts of solutions and as long as neither
party is getting hurt, I think that that is legitimate. I think when
you start moralizing and kind of going “Oh, well that’s wrong,” it
might be wrong for you but it might be exactly right for what those
people need in their marriage and their relationship. So there’s no
easy answer to that except that you have to be vigilant, you have to
sort of read the signs and know when things are not as good as they can
be.
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