Monia Chokri’s third feature film, Simple comme Sylvain, is a film about love, couples, and female desire. It is also a look at social divisions and class contempt, through the passionate love story between a 40-year-old philosophy teacher and a very down-to-earth construction contractor.
In theory, everything separates Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), a Montreal intellectual, and Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a handyman from the Laurentians. In fact, their physical attraction brings them together in an irresistible way.
Sophie is in a dormant relationship with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), a university professor who has been her partner for a decade. She meets Sylvain by chance, hired to undertake work in the chalet that the couple recently purchased. It’s love at first sight.
The courses that Sophia gives at the University of the Third Age on the philosophical theories of love suddenly find a practical application in her torrid affair with Sylvain. The mirror effect is never far away in this film, both carnal and spiritual, with a well-designed and well-constructed storyline.
Monia Chokri examines the traditional couple and its compatibility with desire. What is love ? she asks, asking more questions than she offers answers.
Sophia (which was also the first name of the main character in My Brother’s Wife) abandons a relationship that is going nowhere to experience an all-consuming love passion. Sylvain has a good heart and his values are in the right place, even if he doesn’t always have the right words to express them. Sophia comes from a more bourgeois world, more cerebral, more erudite, more snobbish too.
Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, who is in almost every shot of the film, plays wonderfully with nuance and subtlety, particularly in Sophia’s reactions to Sylvain’s mood swings and clumsiness. Pierre-Yves Cardinal’s sexual charisma works just as well in front of the camera. The current rises to 100,000 volts between the two actors. We can only believe in the sexual chemistry between the two characters they play.
The way in which Monia Chokri chose to film their love scenes necessarily refers, on the contrary, to the images that have always dominated the seventh art. Images, filmed by men, which have made the female body the canvas of eroticism. Monia Chokri’s most recent feature film, Babysitter, cheerfully mocked this male gaze, playing on its archetypes.
In Simple comme Sylvain, everything is suggested, nothing is explicit. Like Sophia who, through her words, during cunnilingus, guides Sylvain towards orgasm, redefining the terms of the expression player-trainer.
Monia Chokri’s extremely masterful staging, enhanced with a few retro references – we think in particular of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Love Story – distils a fine poetry of the image. The lovers are head to tail in ecstasy or become disillusioned under cottony snow.
The characters created by the author-filmmaker are sometimes moving, sometimes exasperating. They can be obtuse, they all carry prejudices. Some are more caricatured than others (the truculent couple formed by Mathieu Baron and Christine Beaulieu, for example). On the other hand, there is nothing Manichean or simplistic in Simple like Sylvain. Monia Chokri does not judge her characters, for whom she clearly has empathy, affection and, of course, love.
