Chloé (1996 TV Movie) User Reviews

Teen hooker alert

[bcrumpacker · 6/10 · 19 October 2014]

Now on hulu plus. This stereotypical made for TV teen hooker horror story is better than usual due to the fine acting of Marion Cotillard and Anna Karina; unnecessary but welcome nudity; and careful direction, lighting and camera work. It also shows more graphic sex and violence than USA made for TV movies.

SPOILER ALERT! Marion is a pretty 15 year old girl with no papa and a remote mother, so she runs away and ends up in the clutches of a typical vicious pimp, i.e. maquereau, ponce, etc. He is one of a long parade of lecherous scheming corrupt men, who wear down Marion's basic decency and self respect. In fact, no other type of man ever appears in her world. The Stockholm syndrome is in full effect. The only bright spot is Anna Karina, an older woman running a club in the seedy part of town who knows Marion's secrets all too well. It was a pleasant surprise to see Anna, who played Marion's role in VIVRE SA VIE [1962], directed by Jean Luc Godard. That movie ended with Anna's murder. Thankfully, here the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that's why it's called fiction.

Marion was a skilled actress even at this early stage of her career, and she has improved since then. P.S. It seems like every leading French actress, even Catherine Deneuve, has to endure this degrading type of material.

Marion Cotillard is woefully miscast, but also the only reason to see this

[lazarillo · 4 September 2016]

This is a goofy French TV movie about a troubled teenage girl who runs away from home. After taking a train to the big city, she runs into a vicious pimp (a vicious WHITE pimp, of course), who forces her to do a and striptease for his friends at a bar, takes her virginity, and then turns her out to work the streets (beating and raping her when she is being uncooperative).

The main point of interest of this movie is future Oscar winner Marion Cotillard in the lead. She is quite good, but also VERY miscast. Even at the young age of 18 or 19, she was much too mature-looking and attractive to be very believable in the role of a hapless, naive teenager. There is a scene at the beginning where a male school chum makes a wager with her and another girl that if he lies on the tracks and allows a train to pass over him one of them will have sex with him. "Chloe" is upset when he chooses the OTHER girl, but frankly it beggars belief that ALL the guys in rural France would not all be throwing themselves under trains for a shot at this sumptuous beauty. And the belief beggaring continues when she falls for the seedy charms of a low-rent pimp and becomes a low-rent streetwalker later in the movie.

Frankly, the best reason to see this movie is the uninhibited nude scenes that Cotillard was wont to do early in her career. If you're a straight male, so much blood will no doubt be regularly flowing FROM your brain that you'll take the absurd plotting, unintentionally campy melodrama, and woeful miscasting completely in stride. Be warned though that the version playing of this on Amazon Prime has all the nude/sex scenes removed for god knows what reason (this is the same service that is currently streaming the notorious Hong Kong "category III" film "Red to Kill" totally uncut). There is really no good reason to watch this nonsense if you can't at least appreciate the wonders of Cotillard's nude form. Otherwise, you might as well just sit through a sanctimonious Lifetime movie on this subject (and in French to boot).