REVIEW: The nature of love questions whether it is more lust or reason

Monia Chokriová is better known in the field of cinematography as an actress either from the drama Imaginary Love or Falcon Lake. It was with the latter, a picture from the year before last year from the workshop of her younger colleague Charlotte Le Bon, which tells about the first bitter love between pubescents, that she apparently adopted an intoxicating retro aesthetic.

With its image, its range of matte shades and dialogues, it seems cut from the height of the Hollywood renaissance in the seventies.

While filming Imaginary Loves, Chokriová met the actress Magalie Lépine Blondeauová, who plays the central role in The Nature of Love. Her Sophia is a forty-year-old university teacher lecturing on different approaches to love according to famous thinkers such as Plato and Arthur Schopenhauer.

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At the same time, she only has an imaginary order in her love life. Although she has a comfortable relationship with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) for many years, she is noticeably lacking in passion. He realizes that he misses her when he meets the straightforward craftsman Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who immediately arouses Sophie’s desire.

However, sexuality is only one side of a partnership, which, if it is to last, must stand on several legs. In addition, the academic sphere in which the heroine moves will sooner or later begin to collide with the working-class environment where her new counterpart comes from. All this puts Sophia in front of deciding what is really important to her.

The story framework with an unbalanced female protagonist, infidelity and the subsequent questioning of deeper emotions is nothing groundbreaking. After all, a very similar arc is built by the Nordic hit movie The Worst Person in the World, directed by Joachim Trier, to whom the Canadian author is also close in describing the generational uncertainty of millennials.

The script of The Nature of Love is quite banal in a certain respect, the upcoming speeches can sometimes be read from the actors’ lips. In the end, however, it manages to pleasantly surprise in unexpected places and invalidate the deceptive impression from the previous scene. A great advantage is his non-violent intellectual reach, which is skillfully adapted to Sophie’s profession.

An essential contribution is the amazing dynamic between the cast main pair, which confirms the winged saying about the attraction of opposites. Their boomerang familiarity, which winds through the eloquent crawler Still Loving You by the German band Scorpions from 1984, is believable until the sober conclusion. He also makes the film a pleasant, yet by no means silly romance.

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