During the Cannes Film Festival, Konbini tells you about his favorites or looks back on the biggest events of the selection.See also on KonbiniSimple like Sylvain, what is it?The synopsis of the film could almost be that of a Christmas romantic comedy stamped Netflix. Sophia, a philosophy professor in Montreal, goes to the chalet in the country that she has just bought with Xavier, with whom she has been living as a couple for ten years and with whom she shares a real intellectual, if not sexual, bond. Upon her arrival, she will meet Sylvain, the carpenter in charge of the works and the carnal crush will be immediate but very quickly subjected to problems of class struggle, nourished by a certain internalized class contempt on the part of Sophia. It is rare — and therefore gratifying — to see female desire and all the deceptions, torments and questions that it can bring about told through the prism of comedy, more reserved for male love and sexual tribulations. In Simple comme Sylvain, we laugh a lot, the sense of dialogue, repartee and comic timing is extremely sharp, the poetry of Quebec vocabulary still just as effective, while being gripped by the power of desire and the cruelty of the amorous dissatisfaction told on screen. But is it good? By assuming the almost past codes of the romantic comedy of the 70s – its orange photography, its zooms, its close-ups, its recited poems, its snowy ballads – and its structure narrative as simple as its title, Monia Chokri immediately installs us in a comforting familiarity and warns us that cynicism will not be part of it. The stakes of the film will be elsewhere. “The important thing for me in the film was that there be tenderness and gentleness. Sophia, Xavier and Sylvain are in their forties so they are calm. I didn’t want to make a film about toxicity, I wanted to extract love from toxicity, which doesn’t stop them from tearing each other apart.”Simple comme Sylvain is a melancholic comedy that manages to be philosophical, sexy and at the same time sexual. Sophia teaches philosophy and is passionate about the analysis of the feeling of love: Is it inseparable from desire? Is it only a manifestation of sexual desire? What does Plato’s platonic love mean? If his academic knowledge does not seem to help him much, he offers the spectators keys to understanding, comes to nourish the reflection on the nature of the love and sex scenes that we see on the screen and sequences the film at the way of a lecture, boredom less. But everything I’ve read in philosophy has helped me build Sophia’s emotional narrative, it’s a mix. But in My Brother’s Wife, I had already taken a lot of inspiration from philosophy, especially Italian philosophy.” In addition to the philosophical precepts she masters, Sophia observes the couples around her, like so many little windows on the feeling of love, which only seems to accentuate her confusion: the couple of her in-laws, subject to old age and memory loss, the romantic relationships of her younger brother, at the antipodes of the couple she forms with Xavier, and the film takes thus airs of variations on love. The sex scenes are also one of the major successes of the film. The power of desire between Sophia and Sylvain is obvious, but Monia Chokri’s camera always preserves her actress whose body we never see. The eroticization goes through the way she looks at him and the only pair of buttocks in the film are those of Sylvain. “Regarding Pierre Yves Cardinal’s buttocks, I thought of this image as an inversion of Godard’s Contempt. Everyone remembers Brigitte Bardot’s body but no one can say where Michel Piccoli is in this scene, or even if he is naked or dressed. In my film, it is Sophia who is dressed and who takes exactly her position.” Sensual and moving in its characters, energetic and funny in its dialogues, the staging of Monia Chokri, of great intelligence, deploys all her virtuosity in her last scene, where Sophia will choose a third way in a finally silent final sequence, after all the chaos, only as a game of gaze, mirror, in the cold and the night of a service station. What do we remember? actor who pulls out of the game: The incredible Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, of all shotsThe main quality: His humorThe main flaw: Perhaps his somewhat clichéd masculinityA film that you will like if you liked: Just the end of the world for its restless meal scenes, My Brother’s Wife, Love Story by Arthur HillerIt could have been called: Love at first sight in the LaurentiansThe quote to sum up the film: “A romantic, melancholy and philosophical comedy”
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