Welcome to Anatomy of a Queer Sex Scene, a series by Drew Burnett Gregory and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about queer sex scenes in film. This week, Kayla takes on the 2009 erotic thriller Chloe, starring Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore.
The film Chloe doesn’t really understand sex or sex work, so it’s a wonder its lesbian sex scene is good at all.
Chloe is an erotic thriller, a film genre that seems to have died in the 90s when it hit its peak. Lately, I’ve been watching and rewatching a lot of erotic thrillers from that era, some of them very good, many of them very bad, but even the very bad ones usually do find something somewhat interesting to say about sex and power, about how desire can undo a person. Even when watching the very bad ones, I find myself wishing for more erotic thrillers to come out.
It’s surprising, then, that I hadn’t yet seen Chloe, released over a decade ago so not necessarily new but enough past the genre’s heyday to perhaps count as a neo-erotic thriller. It’s especially surprising since it contains a lesbian sex scene. Or maybe it’s not surprising at all, since as our own Drew Burnett Gregory has pointed out, the film is very bad. I won’t spend too much time rehashing what Drew has already written about the film’s failures. My feelings are pretty much summed up by this: Chloe squanders both its eroticism and its thrills with a bad script and a reductive understanding of desire and obsession, failing to ever make its titular character anything but a device. And without Chloe’s humanity, the whole thing just falls apart. And it’s a shame! Because it could be an interesting erotic thriller! Maybe the French film it’s a remake of is better; I might check it out. But Chloe wastes the potential of its premise — a wife (Julianne Moore) tries to “prove” her husband (Liam Neeson) is a cheater by hiring a sex worker (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him and subsequently becomes turned on by her graphic detailed descriptions of fucking her husband — with its inability to actually commit to the sexual agency and desires of its central two women. Every character comes away flattened.
But enough about that! I’m here to discuss the sex scene and how it’s emblematic of this overall failure of tone and scope. On the surface, it’s actually a pretty great sex scene! There’s lively fingering! Even Moore’s Catherine frustratedly unbuttoning Chloe’s blouse at the start of it is hot. There’s real chemistry. Their bodies look like real bodies fucking, becoming undone. And yet. The fucking music. The literal fucking music! The score makes you think this is an emotional, tender, revelatory, lovely moment. But that doesn’t make sense narratively nor tonally to the film or even the way the sex plays out. The sex is hot! It’s sex purely for the sake of sex, both characters projecting onto one another and using each other. It isn’t deep, meaningful sex, and that’s okay. But the music makes it feel like this is the sex scene from Carol. Yes, it’s true that Chloe and Catherine are acting on their own desires here, but the mismatched score suggests women acting on their desires is always some beautiful, compassionate, almost melancholic thing when it can be hot, messy, self-destructive, more fixation than feelings, which is exactly what this moment is. Or, if something deeper emotionally is happening here, well then the whole rest of the film would need to be rewritten. If the scene were backed by more of a Challengers-style drippy beat or, hell, even more of a horror-adjacent score with some frenetic strings, it would work so much better. Catherine and Chloe aren’t just fucking; they’re fucking with each other.
Other than later when Chloe has sex with Catherine’s son for revenge, this is the only “real” sex scene in the film (and the scene with Catherine’s son still has an element of unreality to it, as Chloe imagines she’s fucking Catherine again). Scenes between Chloe and Neeson’s David are merely imagined; she never seduced him. She used him to get closer to Catherine, who she obsesses over for unexplored mommy issues reasons, information the script is somehow both heavy-handed and withholding about doling out. It would perhaps be a more interesting twist if the film were more interested in Chloe as a character and its portrayal of sex work wasn’t so waterlogged with tropes. Instead, Chloe merely becomes the “crazy” woman, the threat to Catherine and David’s comfortable, if recently unsatisfying, heterosexual marriage.
So, with Chloe, we get a bad erotic thriller with a lesbian sex scene that is almost good. Maybe you’d be better off watching it on mute.
Yes, I feel exactly the same way about this sex scene! Sad to see them squander the talent of these two actors.
Agree, but they need something that help them to create moment better. https://bit.ly/moanchcolbe