The Nature of Love Review

Whether it is Olivia Colman going to bed with a much younger black colleague, Kingdom of Light, Emma Thompson hires a sex worker in Good luck, Leo Grande or Anne Hathaway fucking a boy band singer in The idea of ​​youthe scenario offers space for kissing and self-reflection alike.

This time, the risk-taker is a French-Canadian philosophy lecturer in a comfortable but passionless marriage. Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) is about to turn 40 and is under pressure from her elderly in-laws to have children with her husband Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), but they sleep in separate rooms. And seeing her mother-in-law caring for her own demented husband doesn’t exactly give her hope for the future of her own marriage.

Sophia is adept at teaching her students the roles of agape And Eros In the philosophies of Plato and Schopenhauer, it is all too predictable that it is the latter form of love that consumes them when they Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). A handsome Sylvain, a building contractor who has spent his entire life in a small town, is the polar opposite of her urbane, intellectual husband. When Sophia hires the building contractor to renovate the couple’s newly purchased cabin in the woods, she has ample opportunity to rip off his plaid shirt during secret afternoon sex sessions.

The nature of love is supposed to be a wacky social comedy about intellectual snobbery and class prejudice in Canadian middle-class society. Sophia may admire Sylvain’s muscles and the way he can fix a broken toilet in minutes, but as they put their clothes on and put away the toolbox, irreconcilable differences emerge. She must contain her disappointment when she realizes that her lover’s romantic quote is not a poem by Rimbaud, but a song lyric by xenophobic pop star Michel Sardou.

There are some lively performances from the supporting cast (including director Monia Chokri as Sophia’s best friend), but it’s hard to warm to the lead actress’s overly smooth features (Picture above), whose permanent, pleasing smile never seems to reach her eyes. And the film’s camera work is so stylized that it’s distracting. When they’re not indulging in montage shots of forest animals and drone tracking shots of woodland landscapes that would make perfect screensavers, Chokri and cinematographer André Turpin seem intent on framing each conversation in an intrusive way. This time, it becomes a game of figuring out what’s in the way of the lens – a window frame, a door, curtains, a mirror, another character’s head and shoulders. This cinematic device is so distracting and obvious that, dazed by the camera angles, you lose track of the dialogue.

It’s a shame, because Chokri’s script is quite pointed and there are some entertaining arguments as Sophia tries to get used to the Working class Family customs. The nuances of French-Canadian snobbery about the spoken language may be lost in subtitling, but enough comes through to tell that while Sophia enjoys the fact that sex with Sylvain is so passionate that she burns an extra 500 calories a day, she’s not so keen on his accent or vocabulary.

As their love affair quarrels over class differences, the sex scenes take on a humiliating and desperate tone that doesn’t exactly make the audience more sympathetic to the main characters. Sophia remains a cipher, while the commentary music is almost as intrusive as the camerawork. Unsure if it’s a sexy romantic comedy, an essay on class differences, or an exploration of female sexuality, The nature of love is unlikely to lure this summer’s absent moviegoers back into the darkness.