Canadian director Monia Chokri isn’t big on Hollywood romance movies that glorify unavailable men who eventually become the prize of women chasing them.
“It’s been done, so I don’t need to do another Pretty Woman,” she dismissively tells The Hollywood Reporter about The Nature of Love, a French-language film about two people from different classes falling in love at first sight, that has been screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Horizons section after its world premiere in Cannes.
For Chokri, romance is a surrogate for female expression as her tragicomedy tackles how women view themselves sexually and behave among men. “It’s about what she feels in her mind,” the director says of Sophia, a 40-year-old Montreal philosophy professor played by Magalie Lépine-Blondeau.
Sophia is in a stable, yet sex-less relationship with her partner Xavier (Francis William Rheaume), but finds her sexual desire is reawakened,...
“It’s been done, so I don’t need to do another Pretty Woman,” she dismissively tells The Hollywood Reporter about The Nature of Love, a French-language film about two people from different classes falling in love at first sight, that has been screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Horizons section after its world premiere in Cannes.
For Chokri, romance is a surrogate for female expression as her tragicomedy tackles how women view themselves sexually and behave among men. “It’s about what she feels in her mind,” the director says of Sophia, a 40-year-old Montreal philosophy professor played by Magalie Lépine-Blondeau.
Sophia is in a stable, yet sex-less relationship with her partner Xavier (Francis William Rheaume), but finds her sexual desire is reawakened,...
- 7/4/2023
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love” opens by introducing us to 40-year-old philosophy professor Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) and her husband Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), as they enjoy a dinner party with friends. Said friends (one of whom is played by the director) are similarly middle-class progressive types with nice homes and comfortable lives; Sophia’s job in particular allows a strand of metatextual self-commentary in an otherwise predominantly broad and sexy comedy. It is, of course, a cast-iron rule of cinema that if a film opens with a middle-class dinner party, you’re about to see somebody’s bourgeois certainties undermined, and Chokri doesn’t disappoint.
On the drive home, Sophia and Xavier gossip about their friends’ love lives. Supposedly one of the other couples has sex three or four times a week, but also fights constantly. Xavier is of the opinion that a peaceful but sexless life is preferable,...
On the drive home, Sophia and Xavier gossip about their friends’ love lives. Supposedly one of the other couples has sex three or four times a week, but also fights constantly. Xavier is of the opinion that a peaceful but sexless life is preferable,...
- 5/18/2023
- by Catherine Bray
- Variety Film + TV
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