The Nature of Love
“The Nature of Love,” a film by Monia Chokri, is about longing and searching for oneself through love. The movie lasts two hours. Magalie Lépine Blondeau plays Sophia, a philosophy professor who has been with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) for ten years but is only in like with him because he is rich. They decide to renovate their old summer chateau and Sophie meets the contractor Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). He is dirty from working with soot all day which rekindles her desire. They start having an intense affair that leaves her questioning everything she thought knew about love and comfort while also making her want to throw away what she currently has.
Affairs and love triangles have been common tropes in movies since the beginning (see: “Challengers”), but Chokri imbues this well-trodden terrain with the whimsy of yore and the gravity of now. References, like those to “All That Heaven Allows,” are worn proudly on “The Nature of Love’s” sleeve. For example, daylight will suddenly drop out, replaced by smaller sources a car’s dashboard lights in the movie’s first scene creating more intimacy while still feeling offbeat enough to elicit smiles or set your heart ablaze along with Sophie’s.
The music, by Émile Sornin, feels plucked from cinema’s golden age; so do Monia Chokri’s framing choices yet there’s an off-kilter modernity/edge to both that Pauline Gaillard’s editing (quick montages cut between charged eye contact/spliced together side by side single scenes shot from unconventional angles) only heightens, quickening your pulse as it were; there’s something undeniably charming about how “The Nature of Love” comes together or rather lets us see itself being made.
There is sharp writing tucked into pockets of red-hot lust, fleeting time that runs alongside existential soul searching and romantic trepidation. The way emotions flood the script is akin to falling in love, all nervous giggling and transient desire. Cardinal and Lépine Blondeau share an electric chemistry that tips the romance part of this film over while Chokri never stops being interesting as a director
The love triangle is well-thought-out, and though the Xavier v. Sylvain conflict falls into some tropes, it does enough for itself to be saved. Xavier is rich, intelligent, and cultured but he’s also a passive sad sack in bed. Sylvain is blue collar and “intellectually modest,” with a troubling undercurrent of xenophobia and aggression that tends to come out at the worst times but he’s also a revelation between the sheets. They’re types of guys among types of guys, what Chokri (and the actors) do well is grant them true agency, life, dimension through peripheral characterization in their writing.
What these cut and dry base qualities do for Sophie’s crisis of self-philosophy compatibility vs. chemistry within the story cannot be overstated. As we overhear snippets from her lectures on different theories of love (from Plato to bell hooks), we begin considering them too only not aligning fully with any one source. Each decision she makes teeters on its edge until Sophie grand jetés into the consequences, then reckoning with them.
The movie spends as much time asking questions about existentialism as it does at absurd dinner parties or during leash-wearing sexual escapades, for every sexy steam there are two laughs or full body cringes (“oh god”). “The Nature of Love” is a rom-com for all ages one that looks at why we get confused when trying to understand our deepest human emotions, and does so with every deserved “ooh” and “haha.”
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