The actress-turned-writer-director Monia Chokri flings two socially ill-fitting people together in her heady relationship drama. It’s what she does next, though, that really catches your attention. By Yasmin Omar
In 2012, the Canadian broadcaster Télé-Québec aired the satirical sketch comedy Les bobos, whose title is a French portmanteau to designate bourgeois-bohemians. On the show, two such snooty arrivistes (played by Anne Dorval and Marc Labrèche) wander around Montreal, noses in air, clumsily trying their hand at all manner of short-lived, hipster fads (molecular cuisine, tantric sex, vintage shopping…). Although her lifestyle isn’t the butt of any jokes, Sophia – Magalie Lépine Blondeau’s character in the erotically charged romantic drama The Nature of Love – very much belongs to this upper-middle-class milieu. An elegant philosophy professor, she sits through her fair share of stale, intellectual dinner parties, where guests offer surface-level observations on existential topics to conceal their wider ignorance. Following Rousseau and red wine, she drives her pleasant, if tepid, husband Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) home, and they retire to the comfortable, sexless domesticity of their separate bedrooms.
It’s unsurprising, then, that Sophia’s head is turned by Pierre-Yves Cardinal’s earthy, hot-blooded Sylvain, a handyman hired to renovate the couple’s chalet. The writer-director Monia Chokri (best known as the tip of the love triangle in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats [2010]) introduces Sylvain with all the self-assured swagger of a John Wayne hero. He stands tall, legs wide, his domineering, back-lit silhouette the picture of conventional masculinity. The Nature of Love is a very sexy movie, a prime example of the oft cited ‘female gaze’, with minimal nudity and maximal suggestion. Blondeau and Cardinal fully sell the sheet-rumpling intensity of their characters’ destructive, devouring desire as they smash her cerebral – and his primal – essence together. It’s felt not only in the sensual, tightly framed sex scenes, but also in her beaming smile as she plays, rewinds and replays his breathy voicemail (‘I can’t stop thinking about you’) over and over, a love note in her ear.
The Nature of Love (2023)
For most, particularly Anglophone, films of this ilk, the central conflict is the adultery itself: will Sophia get caught cheating? How will Xavier react? Will Sylvain lose interest? Chokri’s script pursues a different, braver path. It dares to go beyond the fantasy and ask what happens after a middle-aged woman detonates her safe, well-to-do life and runs off with a man several social classes her inferior (something that happens around the film’s midpoint). The Nature of Love lifts the lid on the terrarium of Sophia and Sylvain’s new relationship, and measures how it fares when subjected to potentially asphyxiating external factors.
The Nature of Love (2023)
Cracks start feathering through their partnership when they enter each other’s worlds at two paralleled family meals. There is an ever present edge of condescension to Sophia’s interactions with Sylvain’s chaotic clan of manual labourers, where ghost stories are traded and Jägerbombs are choked down (she’s even known to repeatedly correct her beau’s patchy grammar). Meanwhile, Sylvain’s xenophobic rants and incorrect pronoun usage sit uneasily in Sophia’s chi-chi circles. The film posits, rather boldly for its genre, that passion must give way to reality – the true test of any relationship is whether it can survive the buffeting winds of the everyday.
The Nature of Love (2023)
Like Chokri’s pastel-hued, beautifully composed Babysitter (2022), The Nature of Love is supremely stylish, with disorienting corporeal close-ups and conversations edited to the rhythms of a jukebox track. They largely (smartly) fall away as we move past the movie’s heightened, blush-of-love phase, though a few shaky dramatic devices do persist. Chokri has shown a tendency to overwrite her previous projects; here, underlining that Sophia’s philosophy lectures on romance perfectly dovetail with the emotions she’s feeling for Sylvain at any given time is a little too cute.
Notwithstanding, The Nature of Love offers a well rounded, even-handed view of an amorous dalliance – from the fizzing endorphin rush to the inevitable comedown – that’s sympathetic to both parties. The tug-of-war between the head and the heart, it warns, shouldn’t be so clear-cut. A balance is critical to achieving stable, long-lasting love. Then again, who can think that rationally when faced with the kind of bulldozing lust Sophia experiences?
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