The Nature of Love is a French-Canadian film about an academic who considers herself happily married but then encounters a builder and sparks fly. I’ve made it sound like one of those Confessions… films, or an airport novel, but it isn’t. It’s sly, sexy and smart and, even though it’s billed as a romantic comedy and skips along nicely, it also asks some important questions, such as: once a relationship becomes humdrum has it moved to a deeper plane? Or is that the lie we tell ourselves? To compensate?
Written and directed by Monia Chokri, the film stars Magalie Lépine Blondeau as Sophia who, like Glenn Powell’s character in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, is a philosophy professor.
This is convenient as it allows characters to narrate on the subject in hand via their lectures in a way that wouldn’t work nearly as well if, say, they were employed in a fish factory (though I would like to see that). She lectures on, yes, the nature of love. ‘According to Plato,’ she might say, ‘love is inextricably linked to desire…’ But is it? Or can one exist without the other?
Sophia is, at the outset, happily if unexcitingly married to Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), also an academic. They are companionable and comfortable and have a solid social circle and a lovely house but the spark? No sign. It’s slipped away as they’ve slipped into separate bedrooms.
He’s a nice fella but the sort who fills the car with petrol the night before which actually strikes me as perfectly sensible, but there you are. The two have bought a cottage in the woods as a weekend home that’s in need of renovation so, with that full tank of petrol – well done, Xavier! – she drives there to meet the builder.
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