A cliche sits at the centre of The Nature of Love, caught by its original French title, Simple Comme Sylvain (which translates as Simple Like Sylvain). Namely, that what a nice middle class woman with a white-collar job really wants is a no-nonsense big-handed guy who knows his way around a toolbox and a woman’s body. After putting up the shelves he’ll take her roughly from behind, or from any other direction he fancies.
Writer/director Monia Chokri introduces us to nice middle-class Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) at a dinner party, where she and her partner Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) are having a lovely evening with old friends, chatting about things in a conceptual, liberal and reasonable way while quaffing glasses of wine. Chokri fleshes in their relationship at home after the party, where Sophia teases Xavier about the evening. Had he noticed that new arrival, the pretty French woman? Of course he had. The fact that Sophia and Xavier are having this conversation from their separate but adjacent bedrooms speaks volumes. Their ten-year-old relationship is now possibly more a friendship than a love affair but they share a good life based on mutual interests and a love of books. They care for each other.
And then Chokri adds Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) to the mix, the builder hired by the couple to do up their summer chalet. Charming, handsome and simple in the sense of being uncomplicated Sylvain is a manly man in a check shirt, baseball cap and beard. And before you can say “I know where this is going”, Sophia and Sylvain are panting hard in each other’s faces.
But this is no zipless liaison. Within scant screen minutes Sophia and Sylvain are declaring deep feelings for each other and she has left Xavier. The film proper begins at this point, and consists of a series of awkward encounters in which Sylvain is introduced to Sophia’s world of abstract conversations, references to art and literature, and she’s introduced to his, of bottle-blondes, Jägerbombs and beery nights out.
In between there are occasional drop-ins on Sophia’s day job, teaching philosophy. Spinoza, Sophia says at one point, draws a sharp distinction between desire and love. So which is Sophia feeling for Sylvain – is she enjoying a bit of rough, Lady Chatterley style? Or has Sylvain somehow bypassed all the superficial bullshit of cultivated humanity and accessed the real Sophia below?
This is a French Canadian movie but the conceit of having a philosophy lecturer comment on her own condition comes from the many French movies Chokri must have watched growing up. It’s cute, very French, a way of layering depth into a narrative and also ironically references Sophia’s world where feelings are validated by intellectual assertion. That’s if we’re being forgiving. If we’re not it’s a gigantic honking arrow drawn on the screen.
Hey ho. What actually surprised me more about this film is that it’s described – on the IMDb, in the original press release, in various reviews – as a comedy. I don’t think I smiled even once. The feelings I thought Chokri was trying to summon were ones of deep uneasiness. Sylvain and Sophia alone together are fine, wrapped up in a cocoon where misunderstanding can be dispelled by hard physical love-making (sensually portrayed). In these moments he seems like a fine sensitive man with deep feelings and a thirst for knowledge. Maybe one day I’ll write poetry for you, he says at one point. And she seems like a woman in love re-assessing everything about her existence up to meeting this wonderful man. A simple life for me from now on, she enthuses to a friend.
But once he is on her territory, with her old friends, he seems like a lout, a brute, a conspiracy theorist. And she, for her part, when she meets his family, comes across as cold, aloof, judgmental, sanctimonious.
These encounters, and Chokri gives us plenty of them, are where the desire/love duality is put to the test, if not the sword, and where Blondeau and Cardinal earn their acting stripes.
I loved their acting. I loved the dark cinematography by André Turpin, who visually spells out how murky all this apparently simple Spinoza business really is. He’s done a lot of Xavier Dolan films and also Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (which is indeed incendiary), so knows about emotional explosion. Turpin also adds the suggestion that what we’re watching is not a romance, not really, and certainly not a comedy, but a horror movie, which neither of the main characters, nor anyone else in the film, knows they are in. In horror there are certain rooms that certain people should not enter. But both Sylvain and Sophia have done just that. Now watch as they encounter… what?
The Nature of Love – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
