The Nature of Love: an overworked but thoughtful rumination on romance

“Humans destroy to create new things,” observes Sophia idly at a Montreal dinner party. It’s the faintest batsqueak of warning to the audience that this sweet-natured fortyish lecturer on the philosophy of love, snug in a pleasant, passionless marriage, will find herself sideswiped by a coup de foudre. Monia Chokri’s spiky tale has all the elements of a twinkly Netflix romcom, as Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) falls hard and fast for Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the rugged, beer-swilling contractor renovating her rural lake cabin. But from them she’s fashioned a sharp, sensuous comedy, puzzling over the clash between love and class identity to stitch Sophia and Sylvain’s torrid affair into a pointed social satire.

Chokri carefully picks over the upheaval of Sophia’s tidy, cerebral life, which has been overwhelmed by her delight in their urgent, adulterous couplings. The professionally ethical Sophia can’t reconcile her covert months of feverish backwoods excitement with her loyalty to know-it-all husband Xavier. Cleverly reworking the tropes of the class-crossing romance, the film sidesteps the sentimentality of Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) or the doomy melodrama of contractor-cautionary tale Leaving (2009), focusing on Sophia’s doggedly academic attempts to weigh up a risky new love against her cosy, intellectual home life. Can she pledge herself to a man to whom Michel Sardou’s cheesy lyrics are the last word in love poetry?

Tonally, the film rides a fine if occasionally unsteady line, between celebrating Sophia and Sylvain’s joy in one another, and mocking their utter romcomminess. Swoony retro music cues swell around the couple as they gaze raptly at one another. Giddy autumnal shots skim the lake and russet woods outside Sophia’s Quebec cabin, emphasising the ‘earthy’ and ‘natural’ qualities she finds entrancing in Sylvain. Chokri’s script even sets up a mind-body opposition between Sophia’s chattering-class city life, with its screwball-pace dialogue, and her slow, sex-centred rural idyll with Sylvain. Once they are a legitimate couple, however, the film dedicates itself to the grating mismatch between Sophia’s snobby, bougie circle and Sylvain’s boozy, book-shunning family.

The results are comic, poignant and overworked, but underpinned by fine, increasingly uneasy lead performances. Cardinal’s openhearted Sylvain is far from a cartoon hick, but Lépine-Blondeau injects into her infatuation just the right amount of growing irritation at his uncouthness. Chokri’s readiness to explore love’s endless uncertainties makes for a fresh, thoughtful take, but one ultimately unsure where to land its ruminative romance.

► The Nature of Love is in UK cinemas from 5 July.