During its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, where it appeared in the Un Certain Regard section, Simple as Sylvain received a seven-minute ovation. It is not surprising that the Cannes public, not known for its complacency, succumbed to Monia Chokri’s third feature film (My brother’s wife, Baby sitter), where the director borrows from the great philosophers to discuss love with finesse and humor.
“I read a lot of philosophy and it inspires me enormously in my thoughts,” she confides. This film is a bit of a coincidence, that is to say that while thinking about love, I looked at what philosophers had said about it. Philosophers have not dealt much with love because it was a subject that was relegated to literature, but what they said about it is interesting and allowed me to structure the film in relation to what lives the character, by presenting the theory, then the application. »
Professor of philosophy at the University of the Third Age, in a relationship for 10 years with an anthropologist, Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), aged 40, without children, Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) leads an uneventful existence until the day Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) appears, the handyman that Xavier hired to renovate their new chalet.
Between these two beings evolving in diametrically opposed environments, it is the “ass of lightning”, as Réjean Ducharme would say. Listening only to her instincts and desires, the intellectual Sophia throws herself headlong into a torrid affair with the manual Sylvain, who recites songs by Michel Sardou for her.
With its magnificent images of the boreal forest by André Turpin, its sophisticated soundtrack, its precise staging and its witty dialogues, this sentimental comedy takes the film buff off the beaten track, where they will very early be confronted with their own considerations on love and the couple.
To add spice to the whole, the filmmaker likes to juggle with the codes of naughty comedy from the 1970s, then flirts with situation comedy, comedy with a social flavor, family drama and sentimental drama. With disconcerting skill, she summons both the heart and the mind, without ever leveling down.
“I never want to make a comedy, I just try to write how I imagine life. Sometimes I find it funny, sometimes I find it sad, and I like to make these worlds coexist because I find that it resembles what we experience. I say it’s a melancholy comedy because I think it suits me well. I really like humor, I like to laugh, but I have this deep melancholy in me, so I try to make them coexist in my writing. »
Melee
In order to illustrate this love story, Monia Chokri filmed the bodies by sectioning them, isolating each of their parts, sometimes going so far as to hide the faces when Sophia and Sylvain kiss greedily.
“When we meet someone, we fantasize a lot, we place a lot of our desires on what they are until the moment there is a deconstruction of this person. When we see Sylvain for the first time, we only see his shadow; I liked the idea that we had a blank page on which we could project whatever we wanted and that gradually we would encounter it. I cut out the faces a little when they kiss because there was this idea of the forbidden. I wanted the spectators to want to tilt their heads to see them better. »
The mirror, in cinema, is a passion for me, but also for many filmmakers, including Truffaut, Tarkovsky and Altman. The mirror is the symbol of our perception of ourselves, of that which others have of us, of the double of ourselves, of looking at ourselves from the outside, of not being in phase with what we is, what we feel, what we want to experience, and, in general, our relationship to the image.
In the most intimate scenes, the filmmaker also uses mirrors: “The mirror, in cinema, is a passion for me, but also for many filmmakers, including Truffaut, Tarkovsky and Altman. The mirror is the symbol of our perception of ourselves, of that which others have of us, of the double of ourselves, of looking at ourselves from the outside, of not being in phase with what we are, what we feel, what we want to experience, and, in general, our relationship to the image. I started this reflection in Baby sitter, where there were a lot of mirrors. I don’t want to make it an obsession, but the mirror is an object that I love to use in cinema. »
Having made fun of male gauze (male gaze) in Baby sitterMonia Chokri returns to the charge by recreating a scene from Contempt by Godard, the one where Michel Piccoli, dressed, caresses the head of Brigitte Bardot, naked. This time, the roles are reversed.
“Graphic sex scenes don’t interest me because it takes me out of the story, I end up just looking at the bodies. I wanted to make a film where there is eroticism, but without revealing anything, so that the character of Sophia is a desiring being and no longer just a desired being, objectified as is often the case on TV and in the cinema. . I had to deconstruct myself because I am also caught in the pattern that a woman’s body is more sensual. The scene of Contempt, it’s such a compelling picture of what the problem is. I think men also want to be something other than what they are asked to be. »
On the nature of love
The intimate scenes where Sophia and Sylvain live out their passion are followed by moments of affection that Monia Chokri sketches from a distance, where the music buries the dialogue.
“I wanted us to be an observer of their love as if we were in an animal documentary. I didn’t want us to have access to a lot of dialogue between them at the start so that we remained in a form of fantasy of their story. Their relationship is not based on what they say to each other, but on the attraction of their bodies. I have the impression that it would have been difficult to make them interact on a language level if it wasn’t in a form of sensuality. I wanted to leave the viewer in a sort of vagueness about what really binds them. »
Would the filmmaker have a perception of love similar to that of Schopenhauer, according to whom everything is physical? If she recognizes that her approach is very close to that of the German philosopher, Monia Chokri reveals that she feels closer to the thinking of the African-American activist Bell Hooks, author ofAbout of love (All About Love), bestsellerof 2000 published in French in 2022, which Sophia cites at the end of Simple like Sylvain.
“It’s an extraordinary book that changed my perception of love and how to experience it. It is very restorative and should be read, taught. She explains that we have forgotten that loving is an action verb. Other philosophers are very much into fatality, like Jankélévitch, who says that love is something that we endure, which means that we must accept any behavior towards us because we are prisoners of our own feelings. What I find beautiful is that bell hooks says that choosing to love means that we deserve certain things in love and that we no longer accept others, that love is tameable. After all, if we can tame fear and anger, why can’t we tame love? »
Simple like Sylvain will be released on September 22.