The Nature of Love

Simple Comme Sylvain

VERDICT: A city girl and country boy fall in love in Monia Chokri's dramatic rom-com that presents a superficial look at how opposites attract.

Ever since humans were able to grunt to communicate affection for another person, the world’s greatest minds have grappled with understanding and defining the elusive, unpredictable, and disorienting feeling of desire. If history’s deepest thinkers haven’t been able to sort out the riddle of affection, what chance do the rest of us have? Monia Chokri’s third feature The Nature of Love — and the filmmaker’s second to land in Un Certain Regard following her debut A Brother’s Love — wades into these uncertain waters with a romantic drama whose philosophical musings can’t patch over the film’s slight, largely inconsequential construct.

On paper, Sophia (Magalie Lépin Blondeau) and Xavier (Francois Létourneau) are the perfect match: intellectual equals living in metropolitan Montreal, with a tight-knit circle of similarly minded, progressive friends. However, the fact they sleep contentedly in separate bedrooms belies a rift in their relationship that they’re perhaps not ready to acknowledge. That crack turns into a full blown rupture when Sophia falls for Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the burly, handsome, rural Québécois contractor hired to do repairs on their newly purchased chalet in the countryside. Sophie’s newfound passion sends her into an ideological and emotional spiral as she splits with Xavier, and tries to reconcile her connection to a person that in almost every regard is the opposite of who she should logically be drawn to.

Certainly, Sophie is no stranger to unpacking complex theses about lust and longing. In fact, she’s a university professor who, while waiting for a full-time staff position, is teaching a class for seniors, walking them through the ruminations of scholars and theorists like Plato, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and bell hooks about just those topics. It’s in this way that Chokri, without much subtlety, builds the contrasting values of Sophie and Sylvain. She’s worldly and academic, he’s a redneck who’s never been on a plane and emails his mother articles about UFOs. But hey, the sex is really good. However, Chokri’s attempt to play an even hand between the couple is disingenuous as her screenplay never affords Sylvain the same complexity as Sophie.

Largely focused on the swoony and carnal early days of their relationship, Chokri mostly keeps us inside Sophie and Sylvain’s little bubble. But where we follow Sophie as she talks to her friends and even her mother about the intricacies of this unexpected liaison, and turns to them for support when jealousy and fights eventually simmer and bubble over, Sylvain remains somewhat one dimensional (the film’s French title Simple Comme Sylvain — simple like Sylvain — is perhaps more indicative of the film’s perspective of its male lead). If he’s overwhelmed or intimidated by dating someone like Sophie, Chokri doesn’t grant him the vocabulary to speak his mind, instead choosing to let it manifest through clumsy clichés of shouting and slammed doors.

The film builds to a climatic party sequence in which Sylvain finally meets Sophie’s lefty friends, and makes one faux pas after the other. Arriving in a loud button up shirt that seems like it was purchased at a gas station — just the first and most minor of his social ill graces to come — Chokri leaves Sylvain out to dry, tipping her sympathies to Sophie as someone lost who has dragged along this mostly harmless contractor into her world as collateral damage. If Chokri is interrogating her own biases about the working class along the way, the insubstantial and episodic script doesn’t go deep enough to make that impression.

Earlier this year, Ira Sachs’ Passages debuted in Berlin, and its portrait of a relationship in stasis, and a partner who finds a renewed physical and emotional spark in the arms of another is a richer, spikier and more truthful version of what Chokri is attempting here. Love can be painful, intoxicating, and dizzying, but it’s rarely artificial, a sentiment that unfortunately manifests more often than it should in this film.

Director: Monia Chokri
Screenplay: Monia Chokri
Cast: Magalie Lépin Blondeau, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Monia Chokri, Francois Létourneau, Steve Laplante
Producers: Sylvain Corbeil, Nancy Grant, Nathanae?l Karmitz
Cinematography: André Turpin
Production design: Colombe Raby
Editing: Pauline Gaillard
Music: Emile Sornin
Sound: Francois Grenon, Julien Roig, Olivier Guillaume
Production companies: Metafilms (Canada), MK Productions (France)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In French
111 minutes