As I was checking out the trailers for the films opening at my local art-house theater, I noticed a trailer that reminded of a French film I had seen in the big screen a few years back during a French film festival held by my school. When I looked it up I was right, Nathalie... had been remade into Chloe. At first, I was agitated because I do not like remakes to begin with, but what I hate the most is remakes of films that just came out a couple of years earlier! As I thought about it though I figured I should give the film a try because it did seem like a rather odd choice of a film to be made in America because Nathalie ... does not contain the amount of action American audiences are accustomed to and also has some moral issues that I do not think would go well either. So I was interested to see how the director and the screenwriter would tackle these issues. So I went and saw Chloe. And it turned out to be a horrible decision. The film completely butchered every good aspect of Nathalie..., the only aspect of the film that remains the same is the fact that a wife hires a prostitute to sleep with her husband and the prostitute say she does but it reality she hadn't. The beautiful mobile camera of Jean-Marc Fabre is completely lost, Chloe could not be utilize a more generic editing style than it does because it doesn't exist. The magnificent us of dissolves that Anne Fontaine employed in her film are lost, once again editing in Chloe is just like the editing of every other film released in the States. Emmanuelle Béart, one of my favorite contemporary French actresses who gives an impressive performance, is replaced the extremely dull performance of Amanda Seyfried. Not to mention the ending! The ending itself proves that Americans want ACTION in their films; remarkable dialogue, impressive camerawork, &just altogether great filmmaking has no place in commercial American filmmaking. If I kept listing all the reidiculous differences that were made in Chloe I would never end this post, so do yourself a favor and watch Nathalie... a trillion times before you even think about watching Chloe.
