Quebec director Monya Shokri’s film “The Nature of Love” is released

The film “The Nature of Love” (Simple comme Sylvain) by Quebec director Monya Shokri is in theaters. Mikhail Trofimenkov I was pleasantly disappointed when the melodramatic story of class misalliance suddenly turned into a stinging satire of the whole society at once.

Thanks to its patriarch Denis Arcand, the auteur cinema of the French-speaking Canadian province is associated with something ironic, self-ironic and quite chatty. Monya Shokri did not disappoint expectations in this sense, even if not right away.

She – Sophie (Magalie Lepine Blondeau) – teaches a course at the university on the philosophy of love and desire. Plato there, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and further down the alphabet, right up to modern thinkers Vladimir Yankelevich and Bella Hooks. And, it seems, he believes in intricate wisdom as instructions for real life. For the time being, of course, until life appears before her in all its nakedness.

She also knows a lot about wine and tolerates rather than loves her bald husband, Xavier (Francis-William Reaume).

Her mother is also an intellectual who, in response to her daughter’s laments about a nervous breakdown due to strange love, asks whether she has read a certain amazing book about apartheid in South Africa.

Over dinners at Sophie and Xavier’s house, friends as sophisticated as themselves gather. With each glass of red, the level of intellectual blah blah blah increases dramatically. Is there a universal moral law, are men and women not parasites on the body of the Earth, which friend sleeps with whom, is a person kind, will a certain Josephine divorce her husband. That’s how many fatal issues they try to resolve in one evening.

Generally nice people. If not kind, then, in any case, harmless. Unless they are meaningless.

Sophie also has friends who dream of feeling like the heroines of David Lawrence’s classic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Simply put, sleep with your fitness trainer. That is, with someone who obviously stands a little lower on the social ladder and infinitely lower on the intellectual ladder. Madams wish for animals.

But what was a wild scandal in the era of Lawrence, whose heroine had an affair with a huntsman, today doesn’t even amount to a scandal.

That is why Sophie becomes the object of envy of her friends when she meets Him – Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). Sylvain is in charge of the renovation of her house and, like any foreman, immediately reports that this needs to be torn off, this needs to be sawed off. Well, in short, it’s easier to demolish the house to the ground, and then…

And then Sophie predictably finds herself in the arms of a dork. It doesn’t matter that he confuses the verbs “put on” and “dress.” Instead of “what-what?” asks again: “What?” He doesn’t know about Spinoza and Yankelevich and doesn’t want to know. But he knows by heart the songs of the most popular French chansonnier Michel Sardou, which causes horror in Sophie: he is as far-right as possible. Sylvain is also dubious from the point of view of political correctness in that he does not reject the death penalty and says in the spirit: “And why does everyone have something against the Arabs, only Mahmud works for me – a soul-man.”

But in his house, Sophie splashes in the waves of friendliness emanating from Sylvain’s large family.

They always knew that he was the smartest in the family; it was not for nothing that he tore off such a thin little thing for himself. My alcoholic mom believes in UFOs and almost reptilians. The manicurist sister promises to tidy up Sophie’s nails. Sylvena’s who-what-is-cousin, who works as – who would have guessed – an ophthalmologist, looks like a stripper on a pole.

In the USA they would be called rednecks, which is not offensive. Hard workers, to whom Shokri treats no more tenderly or angrily than narcissistic intellectuals.

The strangeness of the film is that superimposed on the magnificent satirical scenes is a story of truly insane passion. Sometimes, thanks also to the prettiness that Shokri allows herself, she slips somewhere towards “Nine and a Half Weeks”. Sometimes it takes on a harsh sadomasochistic accent. Shokri herself doesn’t seem to know how to put an end to this story. Therefore, he poses it sweepingly and radically, recognizing class misalliance as impossible.