Strangers on a Train

He felt two forces, one that would move the arm and another that would not, balancing themselves so perfectly his arm was not even tense.

Have we all plotted murder in our minds? It seems like harsh Philistinism to assent to such a claim; yet we have all had our share of enemies, from the schoolchild bully who reappears as the workplace gossip or the ferociously jealous sibling of a friend or beau. The fact is that few of us have pleased everyone; fewer still have remained unscathed from the welts and scars that terrestrial life begets. As children we found it convenient to dispose of our daydreamed foes; but as adults pangs of conscience, a feeling as nebulous as karma (which, if it exists as I believe it does, is simply the boomerang of moral law), and other such qualms usually whisper that these are dark alleys down which we should not venture. Yet what if, in the bloody thrall of a childish daydream while in the body of a law-abiding adult, we come across a being who proposes a diabolic pact to rid ourselves of the person we loathe? An old question, perhaps, but one explored magnificently in this classic novel.  

The young man who would be our hero if it weren't for some serious character flaws is a budding architect by the name of Guy Haines. Guy is twenty-six, "five-foot nine, and one hundred forty pounds," a small, slender man whose nervousness is not mitigated by his awesome coffee consumption ("ten cups a day," he at one point confesses). His ambition involves nothing less than becoming the greatest architect in America, a desire fueled more by energy and talent than competitiveness: he is passionate about architecture, loves working, and, according to everyone else (Guy will pendulate violently between self-doubt and self-exaltation), could be the most talented young architect anyone has ever seen. If this premise sounds a tad overweening, there lurks a commensurate payoff: Guy has a devil of a wife, Miriam, a plague upon his body and mind, who will not so nonchalantly agree to a divorce. Miriam is cruel, vulgar, and promiscuous (a long-faced, married playboy called Steve initially triumphs over a slew of lesser rivals, although he too will be overthrown) – which should tell you something about Guy. But she is also nubile and cunning, as she must be to overcome such frailties. And in their brief span together Miriam certainly succeeded in carving Guy hollow:

The word 'marriage' lingered in Guy's ears ... it was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra-cotta-colored mouth saying, 'Why should I put myself out for you?' .... It was Miriam turning from the tall, thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling .... He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of his room, the image grey and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn't it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always?

Guy is professedly a man of faith, which may not be surprising (his conscience will run a decathlon), but Guy is a man of many things. And while the afternoon "like no other afternoon" might remind a reader of Emma Zunz's tragedy as the sole and eternal occurrence, Guy's destiny is sealed when, on an otherwise uneventful train trip, he meets a tall, alcoholic psychopath from Texas called Charles Anthony Bruno. 

That Bruno is insane can be surmised from this first encounter, which showcases one of the more famous offers in modern literature: Bruno will kill Miriam if Guy will do away with Bruno's greedy and unloving father. This trade scheme of unrelated murders is admittedly not very original, having been lifted from numerous noir paperbacks you and I will never read. Yet to Guy, whose last name recollects the French word for hate just as his first name, also French, makes him an average among equals, merely the thought of Miriam dead is so delicious that he has lunch with Bruno as a sort of vicarious pleasure. Some critics would emphasize the career enhancement opportunity stymied by Miriam's presence, a detail I will not spoil; others might think Guy's current girlfriend, Anne, who will make a legitimate run at the title of Longest-Suffering Significant Other, is reason enough to hope for an end to Miriam's days. But an odd passage when Guy is with Anne and her parents in Mexico City suggests something else at work:

He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo .... One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly.

The chessboard floor tiles, "playing cards," "captivity," empty restaurant," and "untraceable promise of the supernatural" all echo the fateful dinner with an evil man he should have avoided, a gambler not unlike the God of Bargains. The woman at prayer may be Guy's mother, or even Bruno's (Bruno will be portrayed as having an unhealthy interest in his mother's looks), and the black-and-white aspect, the suggestion of both newsprint headlines and strict categories, may be understood as corrosive to Guy's mind. Two images, however, extrude the "stained marble stairs," foreshadowing a hideous crime, and the "masculine gloom," the smell of war, of killing your brothers, of the endless protection of endless things, both of which stand in contrast to what Guy really wants – a wife, family, and home. The path to achieve such goals is undoubtedly facilitated by Miriam's bizarre murder, a murder not so much witnessed as sensed by a few of her libertine friends. A murder that so conveniently takes place when her husband is still in the land of Aztecs, Mayas, and very gloomy hotels. Bruno does not delay in refreshing Guy's memory of their little chat – on the train Guy carelessly left behind his personalized copy of Plato's works – and our game has begun.

Cinéastes recur with pleasure to the film based on our novel, but the two works' discrepancies are so glaring as to beggar belief. Hitchcock's Guy is not an architect, but an "amateur tennis star," which makes so little sense for a number of reasons that we had best forget about it. Other alterations, however, are far less pardonable: Guy cannot alibi for himself in Mexico since the action is transferred to the American Northeast corridor, stripping the film of its heat-induced visions and sleazy sultriness; a feeble political undercurrent is generated – 1950s America, like its present version, was infested with panicmongers – by making Anne's father a United States senator; Anne gets a sister who is mauled by Bruno in a regrettable scene which, alas, triggers even more hare-brained vignettes, including Anne's paying a visit to Bruno's mother; and, perhaps most indicatively, Plato is jettisoned in favor of a cigarette lighter with the initials of a famous amateur tennis player. There is, of course, another difference, one so woeful as to deprive the film of any artistic integrity whatsoever, but we will leave that iniquity for the curious viewer to discover. One of the pleasures of reading Highsmith is her fearless attention to detail: "The voice [was] lewd in the morning, ugly with the complexities of night"; "Like an enormous walnut in feeble, jittery squirrel hands, an idea, bigger and closer than any idea he had ever known, had been revolving in his mind for several days"; "Bruno jumped up and shouted against the roar of her running bath"; "A girl's scream was a long arc in silence and somehow the scream made it final"; "In the mirror his face looked like a battlefield in hell"; "The facts repeated and repeated lost their horror and even their drama for Guy: they were like dull blows of a hammer, nailing the story in his mind forever"; "In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same"; "When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter." And yet the most significant and dazzling of Highsmith's sentences may be one of the shortest: "Every telephone suggested Guy." The suggestion is to Bruno, who "didn't care too much about sleeping with women," deeming such acts "a silly business."  What then is not a silly business?  Well, Guy is not silly, and Guy and Bruno are good friends, aren't they now?  Is that why, upon meeting Anne, Bruno claims he and the architect – who have nothing, absolutely nothing in common – were school mates?  If only Guy were as talented in nature as he is in artifice.

cinéastes

Nostalghia

If you were to ask someone of nationalistic bent about the most untranslatable concepts in his mother tongue, he would invariably include a word or short phrase that denotes homesickness (or the much lovelier German analogue, Heimweh, 'home-woe,' of which nostalgia is said to be a calque). He would grudgingly admit that while homesickness is the closest English term, the two words actually lie very far apart. "You cannot really render it as aching for home," he might say, "it is more the yearning to breathe the air in the manner of its natives, air that exists nowhere else." The truth is that nostalgia has expanded its breadth of meaning: now it conveys as much a feeling of missing home as a glorification of the past in the sacrifice of the present and, often enough, of the future – a future that drifts ever further away from those golden years. I have had many instances in my life in which I felt wonderful events, times, and friends could never be repeated, and I was dreadfully right. They cannot and we cannot. What we have in their stead is the sensation of loss and the hope that redemption will allow us to enjoy those moments for eternity. And that is why the preservation of the human soul is the most vital function of culture. I do not for a minute believe that those who worship money and fossils and the materiality of this green globe can ever feel nostalgia: it is, with true love and true art, the deepest of sensations, and it is far beyond their ken as beasts of the moment. Nostalgia for the innocence of one's childhood, of love's labors lost, of the sweetness of things, of books, languages, sunsets, summer evenings of unstinting passion, the headiness of wine and the eternal mystery of our soul's whims – all this makes for an exquisite banquet of memories. It may also make, in the event of proper sidereal alignment, a first-rate Romantic poet. Which brings us to this remarkable film.

We begin with an Italian countryside, something not terribly evolved from what you might find in this animal-slaughtering favorite, a green and brown realm of plain rusticity. At the conspicuous center of our landscape stands a tree, Tarkovsky's eternal hope for the world; to the right and somewhat above the treetop, a power line in the shape of the greatest symbol we have ever known; in the background hills or mountains swimming amidst the mist. Slowly a small European car puffs its way left, the Italian sinistro, and stops before a garden leading up one of these misty hillocks, and a young, voluptuous redhead emerges, her hair in endless knots, first speaking Russian then Italian. As she climbs up the hill through a wondrous garden, the man mutters under his breath that he "can't go on." But he does. He follows her, onward and upward, to a chapel to gaze at a fresco by this famed artist. There our redhead, an Italian by the name of Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), does not ask the chapel curator, likely a priest himself, why women flock to see the Madonna del Parto – that question is very obvious, and would belong in a lesser film. No, Eugenia well understands the despair of a woman who cannot bear children, or a mother whose daughter cannot bear a grandchild. What she wants to know is why they pray in the way they do, so fervently silent, then in a chant that culminates in a release of a bellyful of sparrows from the Madonna's statue. "Why are women more pious than men?" she asks, not incorrectly. The man pontificates a conservative view of women's role – to birth and raise children with patience and sacrifice – and as she walks away in half-feigned disgust, he adds: "You probably just want to be happy, but there is something in life more important than that." Eugenia stops and returns her eyes to all the mothers gathered, all praying to the one Mother, all beseeching that one of their daughters may bear children, a request punctuated by the opening of the belly. She does not look on transfixed, but simply curious. She is curious about her motherhood, about ritual, about all things that get lost in modernity's fire of independence and self-assertion. And suddenly she knows what word is more important in life than happiness.

The Italian for that word, fede, is not known to her companion, the poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), so she translates it for him as vera (вера). She does not, however, convey the information with any solemnity, but with a snicker, and for good reason: fede means both faith and a wedding band, and Eugenia's mind is definitely much more focused on the latter. They converse in Italian (his insistence) even though it seems evident Eugenia's Russian would be more useful; then we consider that Italian may be the one trump card she holds over Gorchakov's Russian wife in Moscow. Indeed, her red hair, her role as his guide to the 'overworld,' and her painful sexual intrigue all denote temptation of the sinister kind and could have led – again, in a far lesser film – to carnal exploration. Yet somehow we know that this will never occur. In one vignette the camera – and, in turn, we and Gorchakov – notice Eugenia's pneumatic curves for what seems like the first time. His sudden compliment that she is so beautiful simply filters a hormonal reaction, and there is often something about very pure and sacrosanct places that shunts minds onto different tracks. Her expression for a few seconds thereafter communicates every ounce of her desire, the entire timeline of her pleasure at the compliment, her arousal, her disappointment when his eyes still do not meet hers, her arousal again, and finally her resignation that even if he did mean it, his comment was probably not enough for them to sleep together. Gorchakov, a melancholy and fatigued creature, has earned this disappointment: he has come to Italy to comprehend why Pavel Sosnovsky, a late eighteenth-century Russian composer, forsook the hills of Rome and a blossoming career to return to Russia and his status as a serf. Some say Sosnovsky loved a Russian serf girl, but some always say that. Others merely aver that he missed his homeland and would rather die enslaved in his native element than live on in exile – one of the most common interpretations of voluntary exile in modern thought. Ostensibly a well-known poet, Gorchakov exhibits more interest in the sadness of the locales he visits – chapels, churches, villages, and finally, these baths – than in any scholarly pursuits. He has not come to discover Sosnovsky's motives, he has come to find his own. His silly joke in Russian to a little Italian girl who could not possibly understand him is one of Nostalghia's iconic passages, in no small part owing to the resonance it receives in its closing shots. Yet at the time it smacks of cavalierness and frivolity, not nearly as sad as later events reveal it to be. Which can also be said about the third tragic figure in our triptych, the eccentric mathematician Domenico (a marvelous Erland Josephson).

It is probably best not to divulge too much about Domenico's backstory, which explains why apart from his outstanding mind and his German shepherd he is very much alone in the world. I stand corrected, there is a third companion: his fede, which is so strong as to augment at once his mathematical reasoning and his emotional pitch. The world simply does not add up. One drop of olive oil (in another much-discussed scene) and another drop of olive oil do not equal two drops, but one bigger drop. What we can say is that as we have three characters, so too do we have three dreams. First, there is Sosnovsky's, recounted in a letter (in Italian) as to why he needs to return to his birthplace. Sosnovsky was supposed to write an opera for his lord, and there were statues in the park where the opera was to be performed. As he approached the park he became one of the statues, and instinctively he knew that if he moved he would be severely punished. Thus, for a moment or a little longer, he actually turned to stone, powerless, and then realized that this was no dream at all, but his own bitter life. And he also realized that he could not forsake Russia, and the thought of not seeing its birches or languishing in the scents of his childhood grew intolerable. Then there is Eugenia's dream, narrated to her Russian guest during a long monologue of frustration when it becomes clear that her desires will not be reciprocated. I need not describe it in detail; suffice it to say that it involves a worm in her hair that escapes under her wardrobe – the context suggests that she has already provided her dream with sufficient analysis. And then there is Gorchakov's dream, the dream he endures after he tells that little girl that little joke about rescuing someone from a pond. And what does he see in his dream? He sees himself as himself; he sees himself as Domenico; he sees churches and streets that were never his but somehow should have been; and he weighs the criteria on which we, consciously and unconsciously, base our notion of what is home. Many claim that for a poet home is his language, the world in which the gilded filaments of his conscience and intelligence fuse into the most sublime and elevated of human expression. So what does this have to do with birthplace or childhood? Haven't countless poets composed countless odes thousands of miles away from their natal fields? They most certainly have. But maybe it is better to ask whether those odes would have been written if those poets and fields had never parted.      

The Afterlife

There is an old literary conceit, as old as the hills, in which the protagonist rumbles through a series of inexplicable obstacles that seem to be at once completely unrelated and complicit in some hideous pattern. What he finds at the end of his search is that both these observations are perfectly true. And they are true because our lives are both episodic and often interpretable only upon death – or thereafter, if you believe that there is a thereafter – and our protagonist is dead. The theme is so common (I will not spoil a handful of stories and films that employ this device) that it may be easy to conclude that hell comprises not ever realizing that life has ended, eternal suffering as to why we cannot just die, why people no longer take any interest in you, and why what mattered before now has little to no meaning. A subtler reader, of course, might understand that those who do not live by moral principles will not be able to distinguish life from death even while still obligate aerobes. Perhaps the only difference is the level of acceptance we attach to them, which brings us to the eponymous story in this collection.

We are introduced to the Billingses, Jane and Carter, by way of the exploits of their friends. Now in their fifties and rather immune to the hubbub and locomotion of youth, Jane and Carter cast a weary look at their contemporaries and find that everyone is doing something that they are not: one couple is split by adultery and a subsequent living arrangement that raises a  few eyebrows; another pair is exposed as embezzlers and smug embezzlers at that (as if, over time, there could be any other kind); but we are bound by numerical convention, and it is the third couple that will raze all other plot lines. This third couple are the Egglestons, Lucy and Frank, who decide that instead of waiting for retirement and a brooding dream of moving to England, they will come to it. They dispense with job, house, and responsibilities that have cost them half their lives and depart to this county along the North Sea which has big blue skies. Just like, apparently, the big blue skies Frank would have gazed upon had he taken the corporate suggestion of moving to Texas. 

It will take three years for Jane and Carter to rouse themselves from the changes that are not nearly as shocking as they might seem and book two plane tickets to that most-often visited of European destinations for Americans. What they cannot help are their expectations. Frank has become heavier, rosier, and more deferential in that bluff English fashion; Lucy, on the other hand, has taken on a different hue altogether:

Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.

This passage is abetted by a long sequence on the staircase at night in which Carter, unable to orient himself properly in an older English home where everything seems to be "on the left," nearly kills himself. He is saved, it appears, by "something – someone, he felt – [that] hit him a solid blow in the exact center of his chest, right on the sternum." That something turns out to be the oval knob of a newel post, an object on which he could have just as easily maimed himself – but at this point Carter is unconcerned. His expectations have not been met because he did not really know what to think of the Old World, of its narrow quarters and quaint habits, of its air, its trees, and the numerous species that obtain special attention throughout the story. One segment involves a heron roving the neighboring duke's lands which Lucy and Frank "have never been able to spot." Lucy promises it found, yet the carnivore only appears upon Carter's premonition:

But the grey heron was not showing himself, though they trod the margin of the woods for what seemed half a mile .... At last their hostess halted. She announced, "We'd better get on with it – what a disappointment," and led them back to the car. As they drew close to the glittering, pleated, roaring weir, Carter had the sudden distinct feeling that he should look behind him. And there was the heron, sailing out of the woods towards them, against the wind, held, indeed, motionless within the wind, standing in midair with his six-foot wing-spread – an angel.

It may or may not be important that Carter, who shares a name with the man who located the most famous tomb of modern times, feels the need to turn back and encounter a bird so closely related to an avifauna of Egyptian mythology (naturalists will undoubtedly object to such fuzzy classification, and I am always a factioneer of naturalists). It may be simpler to aver that Americans immigrating to England because of the lack of culture in their homeland, a very common and unfortunately not spurious assertion, will never discover the nest of the grey heron, that noble and incredibly inventive bird, just as they will never ingress the soul of – and I think we all know where such platitudes lead.

While the playground of Updike's imagination is almost invariably American suburbia, England, site of a glorious year abroad, appears now and then like a lily cast afloat upon a pond's gently detonating surface. The name Billings is American enough – it is, after all, the largest city in the fourth largest U.S. state – but in the language of the invaders of Norfolk, invaders who came in savage waves about a thousand years ago, the word means "twin." In fact, a famous tale in the tradition of the "North Folk" has Billings hiding out in some reeds waiting for his beloved (there is also another famous story about a woman that belongs to him, ostensibly his daughter, but that is a tale for another day). Why would twins have anything to do with a plain plot of fiftyish friends trying to be youthful and active and above all, still friends? Let's just say that death and life have many things in common.

Esenin, "Мне грустно на тебя смотреть"

A work ("To look at you so saddens me") by this poet.  The original can be found here.

To look at you so saddens me:
What pain! What pity!  For I know
We’ve but the copper willow tree
In this September left to show.

Another’s lips have come to feel
Your warmth and bodily convulse,
As if soft rain were to reveal
A heart deprived of mortal pulse.

But anyway, I fear him not,
Another joy has since obtained.
You see, everything that remained
Is only damp and yellowed rot. 

Myself I never had preserved
For peaceful life, much less for smiles.
I’ve walked already so few miles,
By so many mistakes unnerved.

Life’s laughable in its off–tones
So it has been, so it will stay:
A cemetery, as gnawed bones
Of birch tree in a garden lay.

So this is how we wither, fade,
And quell our noise like garden guests.
If winter flowers so forbade,
For them one then should not distress.

Chloe

At the beginning of this film, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly a beautiful young prostitute, narrates in a nasal voice-over a completely unnecessary vignette about becoming each client's “living, breathing, unflinching dream.” At least, we have the impression that this is unnecessary. But once we have finished watching Chloe we realize that this throwaway piece, which could have preambled any X-rated feature, is actually the key to the film (admittedly, I found the first two minutes so annoying as to consider the possibility that this was indeed the intention of the director). An explanation for our about-face will not be granted on these pages, in no small part because the work has its reasons for doing what it does. In fact, it has reasons aplenty.

Our young beauty is Chloe Sweeney (Amanda Seyfried) and her bailiwick appears to be the ironically yclept world of the 'high-class hooker,' as if class can be bestowed by clothes or hourly rates. No, the only term we can use is expensive, as in all the items and habits in the life of Chloe’s clients. Some of these clients even flaunt their desires before open daytime windows, such as the one to the Toronto office of gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore). The doctor – who must be supremely well-regarded if she can afford such real estate – has her gaze out the window interrupted by her assistant and assumes an embarrassed mien she will maintain for almost the entire film. Why would a noonday tryst with an expensive whore fascinate an affluent married mother? A few possibilities cross our minds before we are introduced to her husband, musicologist David Stewart (Liam Neeson). A friend of mine once called Neeson the best-looking man in the Western world and this may be the movie in which her claim is upheld. We find Professor Stewart lecturing at a New York university auditorium, three-quarters of which are packed with starry-eyed female co-eds, with the topic of today’s class being this opera. It is here that his students ask him out to dinner, to which he replies that he is obliged to be home because, after all, it’s his birthday. The way in which he replies could mean two, perhaps three things – the repeated chain of ambiguity provides the film’s innate strength – and we are whisked back to Toronto to an absurdly beautiful house filled with absurdly beautiful guests, all awaiting the birthday boy (this includes one of Dr. Stewart's colleagues, Frank, who makes a lewd joke every time he sees Catherine, although it is never really about Catherine). David of course misses his flight – does anyone in the movies ever arrive either on time or unscathed to a surprise party?  And the reason why he missed it, if that is really the reason (we were told earlier he had ninety minutes to catch his flight) sidles up next to him, the same starry-eyed coed who asked him out to dinner. The problem is that she does her sidling just as her dear professor and his cell phone inform his crestfallen wife that he will not be back from New York tonight, a message she will have to relay to her two hundred-odd guests.

What ensues is predictable, almost woefully predictable at times (Catherine just so happens to walk by David's cell phone which just so happens to betray some information about his birthday night), but the payoff is not nearly as straightforward. After deciding that David, esteemed professor and a dashingly handsome fellow with a funny accent, is most certainly unfaithful, Catherine begins to sink into the morass of paranoid despair. They attend a Vivaldi performance with their adolescent son Michael (Max Thieriot) and his girlfriend Anna (Nina Dobrev), but Catherine can only stare at David's left cheek in toothy outrage. They proceed without the horny teenagers – a prior scene shows Catherine powerless to stop their coupling under her own roof (“This can't happen every night”) – to dinner with Frank the lecherous bastard and his tart of the month.  Catherine looks on with horror as David Giovanni all too naturally responds to the waitress's usual query by asking her, by name, what she likes to drink. To clear her spinning head she visits the petit coin and just so happens to run into Chloe, who just so happens to be crying in the neighboring stall, which just so happens to have run out of toilet paper. Ever the caregiver (her Hippocratic oath will be tested on more than one occasion), Catherine comforts Chloe who tells her from beneath stall partitions that men are such jerks – well, she uses a slightly more emphatic term. All this is fine and good, and yet we sense a strange undercurrent, perhaps because Moore, that infinitely subtle actress, seems to sense it, too. Then Chloe just so happens to find (or produce by legerdemain) a massive hair clip that looks uncannily like a dagger and offers it to Catherine. She politely declines the gift and leaves, but we know something Catherine merely intuits. When Catherine comes back, Frank and David are playing “spot the hooker,” which diverts Catherine's attention back to Chloe in a corner with a man she obviously does not like. In the car ride home ensue some thinly-veiled questions to David – who must either not love his wife or be a complete imbecile, or perhaps a bit of both – as to what he was doing on his birthday night and why he was so nice to Delia the waitress, and how many other waitresses has he treated so kindly, and so forth. Another vignette rehashes some elements of the opening scene and Catherine now knows what we know: that the girl in the ladies' room is the expensive hooker she caught herself watching. Our two female leads will meet again, in that same upmarket restaurant, and a deal will be struck whose language gives away much more than we suspect at the time, so on further details we will remain comfortably mum. 

Egoyan is a marvelous director, even if he is too willingly drawn to lurid subjects (such as in this film, not to my liking at the time and maybe due for a re-viewing). His eye for detail, however, is unfailing: the rapid contrast, for example, easily missed in the theater, of the giant portrait of Catherine holding a reluctant Michael as a child, to that nymphet-like being sidling up to David and unquestionably young enough to be his daughter; or Chloe's gently defensive expression when Catherine storms out of one of their meetings; or Catherine's own reaction when Chloe interrupts her story with a violent sneeze. Egoyan based his work on a French film that I detested, a tribute to a tighter script, sensational cinematography, and generally superb acting. I have not retained Nathalie... in the minute vividness with which I tend to remember remarkable movies, which means that I must have been horribly bored, a charge I could not possibly raise against Chloe. That said, one problem is immediately evident: the role of Nathalie or Chloe must go to someone extremely young, innocent-looking, and not at all imbued with womanly wits (Béart, while gorgeous, was forty at the time Nathalie... was filmed), and in this superficial regard Seyfried is a godsend. Yet Chloe would likely be doomed without an actress like Moore: Neeson is essentially playing himself with a half-Irish accent, and there are few roles less challenging than that of a prostitute, whose every wink, gesture, and movement can be controlled and purchased, not unlike those of the thespian himself. That is not to say that Seyfried and Neeson are not good actors; they most certainly are. But they ultimately feed off the energy and fears generated by Moore, even when Seyfried begins, in the film's latter half, to live up to her titular billing. The ending is neither thoroughly convincing nor foreseeable, but it is a distinct option given the persons we have met and the ambitions they have evinced. And what about Michael, the only molecular combination of Catherine and David, the sullen teenager whom David casually mentions is in therapy, although the reason for such measures is never stated, the sensitive musical prodigy who gets dumped on Skype by his tantalizing girlfriend and then just so happens to meet a pretty blonde girl who likes musicians? Let's just say some qualities do not bother to skip generations.