Would Chloé wear Chloé? Part 2: Coming Critically Clean

part 1

When is a Love Triangle 
more than a Love Triangle?

CAVEAT LECTOR: 
MAJOR SPOILER REMARKS TO FOLLOW!!!!!!

How many of the erotic thrillers in existence bottom out in a Lifetime Channel-esque family values defense?
By my count: one.

Chloé, a 2009 film directed by Atom Ergoyan

As we have seen, this work is an extended film essay on mid-life crisis and the ways in which, after a time, even the most romantic of relationships may eventually fizzle out like flat champagne, leaving nothing behind but memories of the "The Way We Were". Catherine and David Stewart were apparently quite the hot and heavy couple as youngsters, but times have changed and so have they. As the years--now decades--sped by, and wrinkles crept onto the corners of their eyes, each of the two pursued their career, and a son was thrown into the mix, with the boring and predictable result of distraction and exhaustion. Eventually the couple reached the point where they just weren't doing it anymore.

Or has David been fooling around with someone else? was Catherine's concern, her insecurity verily screaming out from nearly every single scene of the film. On the one hand, she seems to be a strong, independent woman. On the other hand, she is completely overwhelmed by the prospect that her husband may be cheating on her. The thought that she may have become undesirable constantly tears away at the successful physician, making her snap even at David's jovial banter with a mere waitress, who, in Catherine's eyes, now appears to be one of the many menacing threats with which she has suddenly become beset.

Do not proceed, if you have not seen this film 
and have any intention of doing so. 

Inquiring minds have straying eyes, which is why I provided an extra wall of spoiler warning. Now, at last, it is time to come critically clean. Chloé (the film) is not at all what Chloé at first seems. For one thing, Chloé (the prostitute) never slept with David, though she told Catherine that she did.

Near the end of the story, it finally emerges, after the depiction of a couple of hot and heavy erotic scenes between the young prostitute and the suspected cad, that the real reason for David's loss of interest in his wife is that he is simply too tired to sleep with anyone, worn down by his excessive workload as a college professor and growing older day by day.

Too many performances prancing about the stage; too many late nights grading bad term papers on Beethoven. By the end of the day, David wants nothing more than to sleep. He has simply lost the vim and verve and, well, drive, that he had in his earlier years. Yes, that's right, notwithstanding the mounting circumstantial evidence, Catherine's husband has not been sleeping with anyone, neither his middle-aged wife, nor his fresh as a daisy co-eds, as she had suspected and feared.

He skipped his birthday party not to spend extracurricular time with a student (the one whose image blipped into his device the next day) but because he, like Catherine, was constantly cringing at the thought of his inexorably advancing age.

This viewer was fooled by the film because in it the young prostitute described in detail a series of erotic scenes between herself and David which never in fact took place, though they were vivid enough to conjure up high-definition technicolor images in Catherine's mind. The images on the screen were how things seemed to the would-have-been-cheated-on wife, and that was what the viewer was permitted to see, as though the scenes had really transpired within the world of the film!

Clever, Atom, very clever. But why, one may inquire, would Chloé do such a thing? The clues begin early on, but ultimately the answer to the mystery is that Chloé, the prostitute, has fallen for Catherine, the gynecologist.

Eventually the two women wind up in bed in a hot and heavy lesbian love scene, as Catherine, in her despair, accepts Chloé's overture as a way of connecting with David, with whom, she believes, the young prostitute has recently connected. (No, I am not joking.)

Chloé, on the other hand, ascribes far more significance to the encounter, as she has grown quite fond of Catherine through their various meetings and discussions. 



The morning after, Chloé sends Catherine a souvenir of their afternoon delight, at which point it becomes clear that the young prostitute is now smitten with the distinguished older woman:

But wait, there's more: the fun has only just begun!

Regular visitors to the salon de parfum are apt to have been wondering in the back of their mind whether the inclusion of a son in this fabulous fable was completely gratuitous. A father, a mother, a son... could there also be some Freudian content here?

It seems as though Atom must have read your mind, for the son did indeed figure in the love tetrahedron of this not-so-little morality tale.

Early on in the story, Michael and Chloé had met at Catherine's office. Chloé had gone there to deliver papers documenting her STD-free state. Michael had stopped by to retrieve the formal suit which his mother had apparently picked up for him from the dry cleaner so that he could wear it to his piano recital.

The chemistry between the prostitute and the son was unmistakeable as they hovered for a moment over Catherine's copy machine. Michael, in particular, seemed especially taken with the young woman, perhaps in part because he had recently been virtually dumped (online!) by his own girlfriend, who had decided that she did not want to be "tied down" after graduation:

Naturally, Michael had no idea that Chloé was a prostitute, and his mother was taken aback to find that the two had been chatting while waiting for her to arrive. But it wasn't simply that she feared the potentially corruptive effect which a prostitute might have upon her son. No, Catherine had been suffering from her son's disaffection as well as her husband's at the same time. Having been seemingly abandoned simultaneously by both her husband and her once affectionate son, Catherine has been plagued by the specter of having somehow failed both as a wife and as a mother.

In reality, we have seen the real reason for her husband's lack of attention, and her son's was nothing more than the usual teenage aloofness toward parents who of a sudden begin to seem incredibly uncool and to be avoided, even spurned, at all costs. After all, uncoolness may well be contagious!

When Catherine catches her son with his girlfriend in the house, having just spent the night together, she is visibly annoyed, and the sight of their exuberant youth and the memory of how she and David had once been intensifies her growing concern that her husband is now sleeping with someone not unlike this young lady who has just spent the night with her son!

To return to Chloé, where we last left off, she had developed something of a crush on Catherine. When the young lovestruck woman shows up at Catherine's office, flowers in hand, the physician is visibly perturbed and recognizes that she needs to call a halt to this narrative as quickly as she can.

She informs Chloé that the affair was a mistake and that she is sorry, but they had a business relationship which is now over, and they are now through. She asks the young prostitute how much money she wants, and takes out a checkbook and writes a big check, ripping it from the pad and thrusting it at Chloé in the hope that she will take the money and be on her way.

Chloé is crushed and rails at Catherine, telling her that what they had was real and that she knows that Catherine knows that it was real and that this has nothing to do with money. Chloé does not want Catherine's money, she wants Catherine!!!!!!!!!!!!

Devastated, Chloé sets out to find a way to win Catherine back. Her plan starts with Catherine's son, whom she essentially stalks, following him to the Stewart home.

Being a handsome young lad, Michael naturally believes that Chloé has fallen for him. She asks Michael to show her around his house, and they end up in Catherine and David's bedroom, where Chloé proceeds to undress.




As they make love, in Chloé's effort to reconnect with Catherine, Chloé insists on staring at Catherine's clothes hanging in the closet. Michael does not understand why Chloé is not looking at him. Later, when Catherine returns home, she finds her son asleep in her bed with the prostitute.

A scuffle ensues, and Chloé appears prepared to harm Catherine with the hairpin which she gave her and found lying on her vanity tray. In the brouhaha, Chloé ends up falling off the deck, to her death.

Having won back both her husband and her son with the demise of this young woman of ill-repute, Catherine reigns triumphant once again.

Would Chloé wear Chloé?

Reflections on Chloé (2009), directed by Atom Egoyan 

Chloé is a prostitute. A high-class prostitute, but a prostitute nonetheless. Her clients are well-to-do Toronto men who meet with her at a hotel adjacent to the gynecology office of one Catherine Stewart, a successful physician married to an equally successful college professor of music, David Stewart. 

The couple has a teenage son, Michael, who is about to graduate from high school. 

The Stewart family is beautiful.

How do the worlds of a high-end hooker and a successful yuppie couple manage to intersect? Certainly Chloé is comely, and Catherine has taken note of her, looking down from above, as she peers out of the windows of her slick office, without initially realizing that the blond woman is a prostitute. From a distance, she looks just like a well-to-do young lady going out on a date with a man of means.Who'd have guessed that such apparently amorous attentions could be directed toward a "working girl"?

Unless, of course, she happens to be spotted with another such man in another place, say, a restaurant where the Stewarts happen to be dining out one night with friends.

Yes, by process of deduction, Catherine Stewart determines that this young woman is in fact a prostitute. She makes her acquaintance, oddly enough, in the bathroom, as Chloé is sobbing and in need of tissue, which Catherine helpfully passes to her under the stall.

Perhaps we can say that shoes are the great equalizer, for from this view, it's hard to tell which woman is which, though their trades do focus on the very same object, so to speak.

Chloé seems to be suffering from love troubles, as she mutters something to the effect that men are jerks. Catherine wholeheartedly concurs, having recently been suffering from worries that her apparently DH may be not so devoted after all.

The two beautiful women exchange a few words in front of the mirror before returning to their respective "dates".

The troubles chez the Stewart clan have been brewing since David failed to appear for his surprise birthday party, claiming that he had missed his plane after teaching a course in another city (New York?).

In fact, he purposely skipped the party. The question looming large in Catherine's mind is: Why?

The very next morning, the unwelcome answer blips into David's cellphone as it sits unattended on a table. 

Let philanderers herewith be forewarned: gadgets are not your friends. No, not even yours, Anthony Weiner.

At this point, Catherine's disappointment that David was a no-show to his birthday party begins to ferment into anger and suspiciousness to the point where she interprets his every word through the lens of a jilted lover. Blinded to all else, what she now sees through that lens is a shameless adulterer.

No amount of yuppie eye candy, in abundance throughout the Stewarts' not-so-humble abode, can lift the fog under which Catherine now labors.

No, I'm afraid that money cannot buy you love, Catherine and David.

All of these trappings of success are worthless in the face of disaffection.

As a self-possessed woman of means (although it's worth pointing out that she took her husband's surname), Catherine sets out to prove once and for all that her formerly devoted husband has transmogrified into just another mid-life-crisis-afflicted cad, chasing after thong-clad nubile co-eds young enough to be his child.

She sets up a meeting with Chloé, during which she makes her a rather peculiar proposition. 

Chloé is at first taken aback, but then agrees to play a role in Catherine's scheme, by posing as a college student and placing herself strategically within David's sight to find out whether he will make his move.

David appears initially not to take the bait. But Catherine persists, returning to the ATM machine to procure the funds needed to hire Chloé once again.

Eventually the two women end up in the hotel room where, Chloé reports, the dirty deed has been done.

The two women sit together in the very same, sin-infested space, 

Chloé's hair still wet from her post-coital shower. 

Catherine plummets into despair upon hearing Chloé's latest report.

As Chloé attempts to console Catherine later that day, at last the moment for perfume arrives. 

Catherine detects Chloé's scent and asks her what perfume she's wearing. 

Chloé informs her that it is not perfume but lotion.

She takes the tube out of her purse and offers some to Catherine, gently rubbing it into her hands.

The scented lotion takes on a new and deeper meaning for Catherine later, when David detects the scent and asks her whether she is wearing perfume. Catherine replies, as did Chloé to her identical question, "It's not perfume. It's lotion." To Catherine's horror, David whispers in a raspy voice: "I like it."

Aghast that her husband now smells on her the scent of the tramp with whom he has only just slept, Catherine is filled with disgust. From here, everything spirals downward, but I'll not reveal the dénouement...

I will say that throughout the story a few interesting subplots pop up, including Catherine's discovery that her beloved son is now sleeping with a young woman who dashes about the Stewarts' house in Victoria's Secret undies.

When the proverbial couple with everything attend their son's brilliant piano recital, what should be a cause for great joy, Catherine cannot wrench her troubles from her mind.

Catherine is mad, and she's not going to take it anymore.

Amidst all of the cinematographic beauty of this film (or is it just yuppie eye candy?), our underlying and truly pressing question remains:

Would Chloé wear Chloé?

The answer, I find, is: YES! Let us examine the facts, and my grounds for this belief.

First, Chloé does not wear perfume, she wears lotion. Second, Chloé must be clean and pristine for each client whom she meets, who may or may not enjoy the rich and redolent scents of natural tuberose, rose, iris, narcissus, ylang-ylang, jasmine, or any other complex floral scent existing in nature.

Chloé in fact needs, in order to succeed in her chosen profession, as a high-class hooker, most of whose clients are well-to-do married men looking for some safe diddling on the side, to smell clean. Clearly, given her market niche, so to speak, she must make it believable that she is not disease infested or some kind of dime-store whore wafting of Tabu.

And she is not, we learn at one point during the film, as Catherine asks Chloé to present her "clean bill of health" dossier before engaging in any hanky-panky with David. Chloé graciously obliges, showing up one afternoon at Catherine's office (she is, lest we forget, a gynecologist), "papers" in hand:

Chloé would not, I think (for a couple of reasons, only one of which I'll reveal here), wear Chloé Love (pictured on the right).

Chloé and Chloé Love

Chloé Love has a detectable iris note, and a resinousness which might or might not appeal to Chloé's clients. Chloé also probably would not wear the original Karl Lagerfeld Chloé, which I am sorry to say that I never got a chance to sniff before it was ruined by reformulation--at least according to Roja Dove.

Chloé would, however, wear the new Chloé, a quintessentially abstract floral scent which falls squarely into the twenty-first-century category of shampoo and conditioner frags. Squeaky clean, as though she just emerged from a shower, Chloé wearing Chloé would be a perfect pair!

I rest my case.

part 2--spoiler discussion

Lessons Learned:The Serge Lutens Wax Sample Haiku Project

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Prolegomenon 

to Any Future Phenomenology of Perfume Perception

July was a very long month. How did this happen? Why did sherapop spend thirty-two evenings of her life with the Serge Lutens wax samples to the exclusion of all other possible posts here at the salon de parfum? you, my five remaining readers, may well be wondering.

It all started so simply, as these things always do. One small step leads to another, and then another, and then another, until finally an inexorable sense of commitment is formed, and one must follow through in order to finish what one has already begun.

That is precisely what happened in this case, believe it or not. I did not scheme for five months—from January 31 to July 1—about beginning the very first phenomenology of perfume experiment precisely on July 1, 2013. No, I did not. It happened completely by accident, or perhaps divine intervention—or reasonable facsimile (I am agnostic, after all). Something, some unknown force, led me on July 1, 2013, to pick up the attractive black wax sample folio which was sent to me last year by the house of Serge Lutens. I had thought before about when to begin sniffing the samples, but there was no real planning involved. Instead, I just pulled out one of the cards and began. It happened just like that, and I did not even realize the date, until I came to the salon to post the first wax sample haiku. But then, of course, it all made so much sense: thirty-two wax samples; thirty-two haiku. The first foray on the first day of July. The rest is history.

Yes, OCD kicked in, and I could not resist the pull to continue on and on and on. Once five were finished, then I was already committed. There could be no turning back. To stop then would have been to admit defeat. Now that it's finally over, and all six of us can finally breathe a deep sigh of relief, it is time to take stock. What were the lessons learned from this extended haiku holiday of sorts in the land of le grand Serge?

1. I learned that perfumes are nothing but a bunch of smells stuck together. They are no different from smells in nature except that groups of them have been clustered together, and that cluster has been christened some name (often arbitrary) and captured in a form where they can be found together again (usually in a bottle). Perfumers can be viewed as matchmakers of sorts, who bring together scents which are not married naturally in nature, but which work together harmonically. Sometimes...

2. When I sniffed each wax sample, I discovered that the different scents brought together were sometimes confusing and muddled and corresponded to no single and precise scene in reality. Could such a fixed marriage between seemingly incompatible scents be sustained? Or would they not represent a divorce waiting to happen, and accomplished through a bath?

3. No matter how cacophonous the mixtures sometimes seemed, they did, nonetheless, manage to remind me of groups of objects. Sometimes it took a couple of minutes, but eventually something more or less clear and distinct would pop into my mind.

4. Haiku ended up being a reasonably good way to capture small parts of my experience of these clusters of scents. In some cases, I had difficulty coming up with an image, because the cluster really smelled like nothing recognizable to me at all. But I was always able eventually to come up with an image or two or three of what the smell(s) reminded me of. The challenge then was to devise a haiku meeting the 5-7-5 syllable requirement. Sometimes I ended up changing the image, tweaking it so as to be able to conform to the rules. Perhaps a more honest phenomenological study would need to be completely free form, with no restrictions or requirements whatsoever.

5. It can be said without hyperbole, I think, that these wax samples served more as Rorschach tests than anything else, because the images evoked were deeply embedded in my mind, or created by combinations of other images deeply embedded in my mind. Once again, Christos of Memory of Scent has been vindicated: perfume, no matter the medium in which it is delivered, above all is this:
   
   

“a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, 

and solvents used to create, modify and recall memories”

6. I do not have static memories. My memories are dynamically connected so that I'll think of one object and then another object and then another. When I attempted to conjure up a single image, I generally failed. Even when I came up with a scene, it was usually more like a film than a snapshot.

7. Throughout the thirty-two trials of this project, I felt a sense of liberation in knowing that I had never promised to be delivering reviews, so no one could really take issue with what I ended up conjuring in my mind and transforming into a concise text. In some cases, each line was a different image; in others, the lines were parts of a bigger image. Sometimes I felt that I was just making something up, but then I wondered to myself: how is making something up different from finding an image in my mind?

8. I have to admit that the haiku structure requirement made me feel a bit less free, but it also made this more fun than simply penning a free-form review. Despite the structural constraint, I still found haiku somewhat less stifling than the tugging sense of obligation to “capture” the scent for readers looking to find out “the objective truth” about a perfume. By this I do not mean to suggest that I agonize over my perfume reviews, but it seems that I do feel some sense of obligation to say something useful, which in my more reflective moments I regret, as I do not believe that reviews are ever objective, so the most that anyone can do is honestly to report their idiosyncratic experience and ideas. The “requirement” is really just this: explain how it is possible for a person to experience this perfume in certain very precise circumstances and at a certain time and under particular weather conditions and while in a certain mood. In other words, perfume testing is not really open to “scientific confirmation” at all, since it is impossible to isolate the variables or to reproduce the same experimental setting twice!

9. Lots of smells overlap, especially perfume smells. On several occasions I found myself erroneously guessing what the identity of the perfume was—usually either Fleurs d'Oranger or Arabie. Ironically enough, neither of those perfumes, which I had tested and reviewed earlier in liquid form, was included among the wax sample folios! Part of the reason why I kept thinking of those two perfumes was that so many of the Serge Lutens perfumes are either thick and powerfully floral (Fleurs d'Oranger) or spicy and heavy, with an emphasis on culinary scents (Arabie). Each time when I guessed that I must be smelling Arabie, in fact, it was something else entirely, albeit also something with heavy spices and dried fruits—at least to my nose at that time. It seems not unfair to say that a lot of curry and cumin is circulating about chez Serge, and it is clearly an acquired taste whether in cuisine or in perfume. On one occasion, I literally expressed gratitude outloud (and HRH Emperor Oliver can back me up on this) that I had been spared the curry and cumin that night through the benevolent intervention of the scent gods—or reasonable facsimile.

10. My impression from several tests of the liquid perfumes of this house remains that many of these creations are event scents, good for experiencing but not necessarily all that pleasant to wear, and probably not something which I wish to smell like to others. Some of the wax samples conjured negative and even ugly images. I did not like the way they smelled and would not want to smell like them nor to  smell other people who smelled like those perfumes.

11. Negative images were elicited by some of the wax samples during my initial wearing, as I devised my haiku, but a few of them ended up smelling much nicer later on down the line. Others, however, did not. As a result of my desire to finish all thirty-two wax samples during the month of July (with one running over to August 1), I was forced to modify my bathing schedule from summers past, when I often bathed in the morning. (Occasionally, on super-hot days, I have been known to take two baths, as my humble abode is air conditioning-free.) I found this year that I needed to take a bath at night, after my wax sample haiku session, for fear that the unpleasant or simply strong scent would induce nightmares in me. My concern on this front was caused by my knowledge that whenever I eat spicy food late at night, I have dreams about murder and mayhem. No, I am not joking, and I could not take that chance, as I had other things to do this month aside from the wax sample haiku.

12. I learned that whatever I attend to in the moment seems essential, but it's really just a selection, and had my focus been on something else, then that thing would have been essential, at that moment, to my mind. This confirms, again, my long-standing belief that perfume review experiences probably should not be stable, at least not for any perfume with a fair amount of complexity. Because I can only focus on one thing at a time, my take on a perfume will be a function of how much time I spend thinking about it. If I apply a perfume and then go do something else, I'm bound to miss many of its facets.

13. This selective attention problem helps to explain the sometimes radical divergence in opinion about a given perfume at fragrance community websites. Some people really focus in a dedicated way on a perfume over several hours; others take a whiff of the top notes and call it a day. These two approaches are bound to produce very different reviews, even by people who have had similar experiences in the past. Of course, none of this is new, but it seems to confirm some concerns expressed eloquently by Bigsly at Bigslyfragrance on a number of occasions. He is fond of reminding readers that he ignores top notes, but it seems clear from many reviews, that perfume wearers often have neither the time nor the patience to “wait it out”, so to speak.

All in all, this was a valuable learning experience, the most important lesson of which to my mind was that perfumes are really smells. As trivial as that may seem, I somehow find it profound. Perfumes evoke memories of groups of things because those or similar things have been smelled before in reality by the perceiver. In many cases, the smells are associated with other perfumes, but they are still things in reality which have been smelled before as distinct and isolable entities which can be found again and again, as someone somewhere decided to group a certain set of scents together and capture them in a small volume of space (again, usually inside a bottle).

These findings help to explain why laymen (by which I really mean nonperfumistas!) believe that perfumes are not works of art but scents, similar to the way in which the chirping of a bird is a sound, not a work of music. Phenomenologically speaking, that is precisely what they are, and although we may wish to lay an elaborate theoretical lattice upon our experience, in the end, comparisons to non-perfume scented things occurring either in nature or in man-made reality are no less valid, and probably more, in some ways. 

As I think about all of these matters, I continue to reflect upon the elizabethW magnolia candle which sits on a bookshelf close to the computer in my living room. I notice it only about once every several days—sometimes less often than that—but each time that I do, I find myself delighted by the scent and amazed that I had not the slightest perception of it for the several preceding days, during which it ceased to exist, for all intents and purposes, to my mind.

Serge Lutens Wax Sample Haiku #32: Muscs Koublai Khan

sitting in a barn

horse manure and damp hay

stomping mud-filled hooves

explication