I knew from the opening narration in Chloe that we were in trouble: Amanda Seyfried, sounding like a dopey school-kid, describing how she services her clients as a high-end prostitute. Yeah, right! It’s the worst and most unconvincing opening scene I’ve seen all year.

The central problem with this film is that Amanda Seyfried is not erotic. She talks like a suburban bumpkin and she kind of looks like a space alien, frankly. She definitely does not fly as a femme fatale. I’m not saying she isn’t pretty in her own way, just not erotic. And Julianne Moore is definitely not erotic – she’s cold as a fish. And the two of them have ZERO sexual chemistry. So you have these two women in a movie whose main purpose is to set up a lesbian sex scene between the two of them. Not a good game plan.

And it really is all about the sex scene. The rest of the movie is completely tiresome, boring and predictable. There is ZERO suspense. It’s badly written. Seyfried’s descriptions of what she does with Moore’s husband are just laughably unerotic, and the flashbacks that accompany them are even worse. You don’t bond with any of the characters; you don’t even like any of the characters! So you wait the entire movie to watch these two women go at it, and what do you get? One lame-ass scene of Seyfried  “rubbing” Julianne Moore, written and staged by someone who has obviously never had sex before. And in that scene they are both so “glossy” they don’t even look like real people. Why the fuck are they suddenly so glossy?!!!! Is that written into their contracts? “Actress may participate in full-body-nude sex scenes, but only if her skin is greased until it shines like a brand new car.” But the problems don’t end there. These two woman can not even kiss each other convincingly! They can’t undress each other convincingly!

The interesting thing about American movie sex is that it only comes in two flavors: rape and affected, staged, posed, embarrassingly fake-looking crap. This tells you everything you need to know about sex in our society – basically, we can’t handle sex. We can make it fake and non-threatening or we can use it as a weapon of aggression, but straight-up passionate sex is just not tolerated. That’s why when we watch something like the sex scene in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, we are stunned and blown away by it.

It’s funny, but I think these filmmakers thought they were “being French” with this film. Here’s what I recommend: watch Secret Things (2002) and see how close they came to a French film dealing boldly with sexual topics.

As a side note, the music in this film is absolutely terrible, and to make matters worse they kept pushing up the volume on it so that it frequently drowns out the incessant whispering and mumbling of the characters. Not that they are saying anything interesting, but still …

What a waste!