By Yasmin Omar
In 2012, the Canadian broadcaster Télé-Québec aired the satirical sketch comedy Les bobos, whose title is a French portmanteau to designate bourgeois-bohemians. On the show, two such snooty arrivistes (played by Anne Dorval and Marc Labrèche) wander around Montreal, noses in air, clumsily trying their hand at all manner of short-lived, hipster fads (molecular cuisine, tantric sex, vintage shopping…). Although her lifestyle isn’t the butt of any jokes, Sophia – Magalie Lépine Blondeau’s character in the erotically charged romantic drama The Nature of Love – very much belongs to this upper-middle-class milieu. An elegant philosophy professor, she sits through her fair share of stale, intellectual dinner parties, where guests offer surface-level observations on existential topics to conceal their wider ignorance. Following Rousseau and red wine, she drives her pleasant, if tepid, husband Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) home, and they retire to the comfortable, sexless domesticity of their separate bedrooms.
It’s unsurprising, then, that Sophia’s head is turned by Pierre-Yves Cardinal’s earthy, hot-blooded Sylvain, a handyman hired to renovate the couple’s chalet. The writer-director Monia Chokri (best known as the tip of the love triangle in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats [2010]) introduces Sylvain with all the self-assured swagger of a John Wayne hero. He stands tall, legs wide, his domineering, backlit silhouette the picture of conventional masculinity. The Nature of Love is a very sexy movie, a prime example of the oft cited ‘female gaze’, with minimal nudity and maximal suggestion. Blondeau and Cardinal fully sell the sheet-rumpling intensity of their characters’ destructive, devouring desire as they smash her cerebral – and his primal – essence together. It’s felt not only in the sensual, tightly framed sex scenes, but also in her beaming smile as she plays, rewinds and replays his breathy voicemail (‘I can’t stop thinking about you’) over and over, a love note in her ear.
