The Nature of Love (Chokri, 2023)
Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love is ruthlessly efficient at juxtaposing the boredom, banality, and brevity of stable domestic partnerships with the thrilling, intoxicating eroticism of newly found passion. In the opening scene, children are screaming, and Sophia’s friends and partners are speaking past each other. It is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually stifling. Later that night, she and her husband lie not just in separate beds, but separate bedrooms. It is a less comic version of Clueless where Cher and her best friend text one another’s phone even though they are standing right next to each other.
Enter Sylvain, a working-class but hardly brutish home contractor who listens, looks sexy and doesn’t mind performing oral sex even when Sophia hasn’t bathed. Pretty soon, she is dreaming of her hunky handyman and pleasuring herself in the shower, rediscovering herself as a sexual, passionate person rather than simply a domestic partner.
If The Nature of Love were simply one more anti-valentine against marriage, it probably would not have been worth writing about. But something interesting happens while Sophia is enjoying her shower. Her in-laws drop in for a visit, and while they strike Sophia (and us) as the epitome of the walking (sexually and emotionally) dead, mom weeps over what appears to be her husband’s early-onset dementia. The man that means the world to her, the one with whom she has been and still is passionate about, sometimes cannot even remember her name. For a brief, intriguing moment Amour and Chloe in the Afternoon threatened a head-on collision and I sat up, interested in what would happen next.
Unfortunately, the rest of The Nature of Love never follows through on the promise of that early scene. It does avoid some of the more obvious conventions of adultery melodramas, but as Sophia, who is a philosophy professor, lectures on what various great philosophers have said about love, her life takes on the philosophical cast of a Rohrschach text. See in it what you will, and there is anecdotal evidence to support you. Never though, do we get close to an answer. The direction comes across more as if Chokri is a debate moderator anxious to give all sides equal time than a judge tasked with explaining which philosophy of love, if any, comes closest to the truth.
In the press notes, Chokri states that she wanted to explore how social context influences and informs love stories. I can see that in hindsight, but because the film focuses almost exclusively on Sophia’s point of view, her social background comes across as normative. It was interesting to see how the differences that attract can become the cracks that divide. Sophia’s mother sniffs out and quickly dismisses as irrelevant her daughter’s infidelity. One night stands are okay, so long as one doesn’t become emotionally invested in the other. Sylvain’s cousin treats Sophia as a sexual rival and tries to rattle her with off-hand remarks about how many others have played her part before her. Sophia corrects Sylvain’s language and then stifle’s at the suggestion that her doing so means anything at all about whether she does or does not view him as anything other than a boy toy.
The script is precise and clever about undercutting anything that might suggest the lovers’ connection is unique. Sadly, though, what gets lost in that approach is the actual love story. Does Sophia care about Sylvain or is she just bored with her husband? Why does she choose to work through problems with one and dismiss leaving the other as inevitable? If everyone she knows has flings, what distinguishes her life from any other? Which, if any, of the philosophers she can quote verbatim does she believe is actually speaking the truth? Any of them? Or is the nature of love simply that it comes and goes without need for explanation.
While I appreciated Chokri taking her subject seriously rather than simply glorifying the moments of passion as justifying all, I felt at the end that I had sat through a lecture on a topic that summarized a bunch of theories without endorsing or giving insight into any of them.
The Nature of Love won the César Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it opens in New York on July 5. Openings in Los Angeles and other American cities will follow later in the month.
