Is it true that opposites attract? You've got 2 hours to find out, which is the length of Monia Chokri's film Simple Comme Sylvain , presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A former star of the Dolan galaxy, Monia Chokri's film is fresh and bubbly, in her own image, but also devilishly funny - rare are the Cannes screenings where the journalists, with their haggard faces and circled eyes, laugh so hard.
Sophie (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), a philosophy professor in Montreal who has been sharing her life with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) for 10 years, falls under the spell of Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a carpenter hired to renovate his country cottage in the Laurentians. Love at first sight is immediate and quickly consummated.
But now he has to choose: the intellectual who spends more time with his nose in his books than in the marital bed (which, incidentally, they don't share) or the woodsman, vigorous by nature in his plaid lumberjack shirt, who prefers hunting to philosophy. Isn't that a rather simplistic and Manichean vision of (non-)virility?
The theme is universal, and cinema is full of works that tackle it, but Monia Chokri's pop staging makes it unique in its own way. With its warm colors, the film is daring, ignores the sacred 180° rule, relies on sharp zooms for comic effect, and revolves around hilarious machine-gun dialogue - the drollery of Québécois expressions has a lot to do with it - as the 40-somethings mockingly discuss the prevailing eco-anxiety, glass of Merlot in hand.
But unlike Sonia, whom Monia Chokri looks on with great tenderness and without judgment - although she can't help rebuking her boyfriend on his poor vocabulary in her eyes - the Québécoise is not so tender with Sylvain and his love of Michel Sardou. From simple to simplet, there's only one letter and one step.
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