‘The Nature of Love’ Review: Monia Chokri’s Delightful New Film Asks What Happens If You Scratch the Seven-Year Itch
variety.comCatherine Bray 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.
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