Hooker makes three

The new film by Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) is a remake of a 2003 French film called Nathalie. And at least some commentators view it as an improvement on the original.

In both films, a wife who thinks her husband is having an affair hires a young prostitute to solicit her husband’s attentions and report back on the results. In both cases, the wife gets much more than she bargained for, and the hooker—the title role in both films—emerges as an unexpectedly compelling and difficult character.

In Nathalie (directed by Anne Fontaine), Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant play the couple, and Emmanuelle Béart is the prostitute. Egoyan has Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore as the couple, and Amanda Seyfried as Chloe. That’s less star power for the remake, but it’s still a very good cast, and Seyfried is especially well-suited to Egoyan’s more extravagantly dramatic rendition.

Both versions have less impact than you’d guess from their provocative premises, albeit for different reasons. Fontaine’s calmer account devolves into comparatively tepid ironies, while Egoyan’s more anguished version implodes on overheated drama and undercooked emotion.

The wife is the pivotal character in both cases, and Moore is an excellent embodiment of a more elaborately conflicted version of that character. But Seyfried’s Chloe brings the distinctive Egoyan touch into the foreground here—a Lolita of the polymorphous perverse, let’s say, and an erotic force of nature who is, in a sense, the catalyst for an entire family’s seduction.