I just finished watching Atom Egoyan’s beautifully shot, taut psychological/erotic thriller Chloe, and if you haven’t seen it yet, dear reader, you really should make every effort to get the DVD.

The story is about a woman who hires a high-class prostitute to test the loyalty of her husband whom she suspects of having an affair. The prostitute, Chloe, is exactly the type of younger woman the husband finds attractive, and so she is supposed to ‘accidentally’ meet him at the coffee shop he frequents. After the first assignation, Chloe reports back to the wife that her husband took the bait; he expressed interest in kissing her. Catherine, played exquisitely by Julianne Moore (an actress who, in my book, can do no wrong), pays her again to meet with David, her husband (a role wonderfully inhabited by Liam Neeson, that consummate professional who incidentally completed filming just after the tragic death of his wife, the actress Natasha Richardson), to see how far he’ll go.

Once again, Chloe reports back to Catherine; she’s seduced David; he’s hooked. Heartbroken, Catherine cannot resist insisting Chloe meet with David again. This time, when Chloe gets back in touch with her, of course, it’s to report, in embarrassingly graphic detail, what we knew was coming: they’ve consummated the affair in the very hotel room Chloe has requested that Catherine meet her.

From here on out, the characters’ lives unravel — how can they not? – and plot twists, of necessity, come into play, leaving us, the viewers, with many questions to ponder. The discerning viewer will, from the get-go, recognise the very dark place Catherine’s desire to get to the truth will lead her and will ask of him/herself the question Catherine never once seems to contemplate. That is hardly the point, however; the movie doesn’t rely on big reveals and breathless plot twists for its power, anyway. What transpires is born out of a middle-aged couple’s marital crisis, which I perhaps am not qualified to speak about. Perhaps if I were married I’d more readily identify with the depths of desperation an insecure wife could sink to. But I’m not a wife. Which doesn’t mean I’m not without my problems, as well. What intrigues me about the film is its commentary on identity — specifically, sexual identity — in today’s world. Sexual identity of women of a certain age, single or married, to pare it down even further. I am Catherine. I’m that woman who has woken up one day, somewhere around the age of 35, to realise that the landscape of the world, that is to say, the sexual endroit she once inhabited, has suddenly and irreversibly changed.

And it’s terrifying.

There’s no doubt that Catherine is the one undergoing a midlife crisis here. As women, we’ve been told that men are the ones who experience this. Lie number one. Nobody ever talks about the confusion a woman goes through when she walks down a road and there are hardly any catcalls and sleazy comments anymore. Catcalls and sleazy comments are merely annoying if they don’t lead to anything more, but they’re missed when they’re absent. Men get to buy teeny sports cars, dye their hair black and take up with women young enough to be their granddaughters. This is how society apologises to them for the emotional trauma and displacement of the event of middle age – by turning a blind eye. What provisions are made for women? None really, except maybe a few snide snickers and off-colour comments about cougars.

(FYI, women of a certain age often become cougars because men their age are busy chasing the skirts of girls barely out of their teens. And, speaking of cougars, from the department of “tell me something I don’t already know”, did you hear about the recent University of Texas study that shows that women hit a sexual peak in middle age, because, according to the researchers, what’s ramping up the libidos of women in their 30s and 40s is their declining fertility? How about telling that to middle-aged men who think 20-year-old girls can give them a thrill in bed?)

But. Moving. Right. Along.

In the movie, Catherine is a married professional whose marriage has settled into, as most couples’ after many years, I would imagine, dull routine and detachment. She at one point reflects on how easily, unthinkingly the rot set into her marriage — they used to have sex three times a day, then three times a week, then once a week, and so on. A common complaint among longtime couples. Indeed, for the entire length of the movie, while there are glimpses of warmth and affection between them, conspicuously absent, though, is any physicality: they sleep with their backs to each other. And Catherine having a good time with a shower head, at one point, is rather blurrily implied.

Adding insult to injury, also, is the fact that her teenage son is leaving her in the way all children leave their parents. He is becoming before her eyes an autonomous, sexual being, with his girlfriend sleeping over at the house. Catherine is a gynaecologist with an evidently thriving practice but somehow, that isn’t enough. How can it be? She craves connection with someone, something. She’s in the middle of her life’s cycle with nowhere to go and, weirdly, no-one to go there with. Single middle-aged women feel this way, too. It’s a What’s-it-all-about-Alfie kind of moment that, for some women can lead to religion, for some, an improper affair, and for yet others, emotional deadness or, worse, madness.

The truth is: women have always been sexual. The dirty little secret that University of Texas study fails to admit is that women of a certain age enjoy sex better not only because of declining fertility; we like it just because it’s, well, enjoyable. And, at this age, we have the freedom to actually admit it.

But just as how there’s that refusal to address most women’s issues, like our conflicting feelings toward having children and/or careers and our midlife crises, the issue of female sexuality is all too often safely buried. Eighteen-year-old boys, at their sexual peak, can engage in sex until the cows come home — it’s what’s expected of them. They can masturbate until their hands fall off. (By the way, when last has female masturbation been written about or spoken of?) But if the silence around female sexuality persists, what will be the fate of women in their sexual prime? All the Catherines of this world, what will they do?