Chloe

Canadian director Atom Egoyan ("Exotica," "The Sweet Hereafter") is no stranger to those dark places in the imagination where sexual fantasies and role-playing thrive, blurring boundaries between what's real and what appears to be true. "Chloe," his latest, is a stylish showcase for Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried, playing two very different women — Rose-Red and Snow White — joined in a "Persona"-like exchange of psycho-sexual roles. Deliberately airless, short on normal narrative peaks and valleys, this brainy thriller unreels like a nightmare or hallucination.

"Chloe" reveals itself through style — color, texture, surfaces, architecture — as opposed to plot flatly announced and played out. The literal-minded will see a slow-moving "Fatal Attraction" occasionally jazzed by lesbian sex, a view that reduces complex portrait to cartoon. Forget realism. "Chloe"'s ancestry traces back to Claude Chabrol's "Les Biches" and Robert Altman's "Images," touchstone films about distaff black magic practiced in the realm of sexual fantasy and transference. And Egoyan's surreal ending, especially the final shot, an ornate hairpin piercing a neat chignon, conjures Hitchcock's "Marnie" and "Vertigo."

"Chloe" supplies no easy emotional highs; the directorial POV is too detached, à la Hitchcock or Buñuel, for that kind of carnival ride. Instead we're encouraged to gaze into this bell-jar world with something like cool voyeurism, savoring how dangerously fluid the shapes of sex and identity can be. (Though Egoyan has written his previous films as well as directing, "Chloe" was scripted by Erin Cressida Wilson, responsible for the sexual perversities of "Secretary" and "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.")

Catherine (Moore) is a busy gynecologist married to handsome music professor David (Liam Neeson). The once passionate pair have grown apart, what with jobs, their moody son and aging. When David misses a plane — and the surprise birthday party his wife's hosted — Catherine wonders whether he's cheating on her, especially after finding an incriminating phone message from a pretty student. A chance encounter with a beautiful hooker (Amanda Seyfried) gives Catherine the novel notion of setting up a seduction scene to see whether David will succumb. He does, and Chloe shares every intimate detail, inspiring revulsion and arousal in her rapt audience. The pleasures of erotic storytelling eventually lead to heated actuality, the erotic heart of the film: Chloe makes slow love to Catherine, flesh to flesh, in temperature-raising closeup.

The gynecologist calls home a series of glassed-in cubes poised on the edge of a wooded ravine. Lonely, repressed, she prowls her cold, ultra-modern citadel like a lost soul, alienated from husband (frequently glimpsed laughing in his office, framed through a glass partition) and son, who slams his door in her face whenever she pries into his lovelife. Much of "Chloe" is framed, mirrored or "under glass"; this stylistic gestalt reflects how ruthlessly self-absorbed Catherine perceives herself and imagines others.

Despite the intensity of her red-haired beauty, Catherine sees herself as losing substance, a ghost among flesh-and-blood sensualists. In an upscale restaurant she watches David flirt with the waitress while their friends, a man their age nuzzling his blonde "child" bride, are oblivious to her existence. And just when "invisibility" chafes most, Chloe materializes — a reflection in a mirror, where so many of the women's subsequent interactions are framed.

The projection of everything Catherine is not — young, unfettered, a sexual pro — the girl with the translucent eyes and lush mouth is a perfect avatar. In the film's prologue, Egoyan painted Chloe before a mirror, her naked, voluptuous flesh glowing in golden candlelight. Suspended in black nothingness, she's pure erotic fantasy, figment of desire. Her childishly sing-song mantra defines Chloe's function and fate: once she's enacted "a living, breathing, unflinching dream ... I can disappear." Before finally crashing out of her creator's dream-mirror, this avid child of Catherine's fertile imagination transports her mother/lover back to libidinous life, where orgasms far exceed the gynecologist's clinical definition, "the contraction of muscles."

Seyfried's a genuine surprise, having never hinted at such raw courage in exercises like "Mamma Mia!" and "Dear John." As Chloe works to anticipate Catherine's every desire, her expressions are as mutable as a moving picture. Pink-slipped, Seyfried's dream girl goes bad, incarnating her client's dread of passion without limits or boundaries. Moore, always first-rate, fairly pulses with ruddy appetite, craving the return of her directorial/star power over the men walled in her glass house. One wishes for more of Liam Neeson's complexly masculine David; "Chloe" was shooting in Toronto when Neeson's wife Natasha Richardson died.

Egoyan's longtime cinematographer Paul Sarossy lends this dark fable the depth and color of some fabulous tapestry. (Prime example: a candlelit tête-à-tête in a dark bar, snow falling outside in late-afternoon light.) Lovely to see Toronto given real presence, but what really holds your gaze in "Chloe" are the marvelously mobile faces of Moore and Seyfried, mirrors of each other's desire.