More than a social love story, Simple comme Sylvain invites you to love yourself in order to be loved properly

After its appearance in Cannes and its release in theaters on Wednesday 8 November, we have read a lot of it Simple as Sylvain it was good romantic comedyalso having the merit of having a social dimension.

If this reading is true, it is above all true Very reductive. You only see a little clip in Monia Chokri’s film feel goodthe fun and comforting ending with a nice moral would return completely missing.

Actually, Simple as Sylvain has something to leave a mark on French cinema. Beyond the jubilant dialogues carried out by prodigy actors, the film tells with finesse, humor and emotion the way in which gender norms corrupt love. Thanks to the richness of its screenplay and direction, Monia Chokri he speaks of love with as much tenderness as lucidity. Compare the fiery, magnificent ideal of love and desire with the reality of a society that teaches women to do so to hate oneself, to crush oneself and to believe that one’s worth depends on the gaze of a manand where the latter are walled up the inability to communicate.

In an interesting interview, Monia Chokri revealed to us the secrets of her cinema and liberated love.

As simple as Sylvain, what is it all about?

Sophia is a philosophy professor in Montreal and has been living with Xavier for 10 years. Sylvain is a carpenter for the Laurentians and must renovate their country house. When Sophia meets Sylvain for the first time it’s love at first sight. Opposites attract, but can it last?

Interview with Monia Chokri, director of Simple comme Sylvain

To miss. The film nourishes a very dense reflection. It gives the impression of having been written over a long period of time. Can you tell us about its genesis?

Monia Chokri. I started writing it at the end of filming The wife of my brotherin 2018. I definitely wanted my second film to be written [Monia Chokri n’a pas écrit Babysitter, ndlr] or a love movieespecially since there are very few of them in Quebec.

Working on love, the idea of couple it must have arrived. Despite being a great lover, I have difficulty adhering to the couple system. Reading about the couple I understood that it is because it is a political, economic and social system which for a long time had nothing to do with love. For me there is tension because love is a feeling without rules, which is rather anarchic, while the couple is a capitalist system. A couple has economic plans: living together, shopping, having children, travelling, going to IKEA…

I also realized that the couple contains extreme social inequality. Indeed, love stories are rarely casual. There are very few class defectors in our romantic relationships, so it is necessarily an unequal system. The writing of the film was long also because the reflection was long. It has transformed through my experiences and evolved with me.

In Simple comme Sylvain, we are struck by your inclination to film the world from the point of view of Sophia, the heroine. Was the desire to identify with this woman central to your writing?

Yes, I wanted to tell the intimate story of a 40-year-old woman and I’m happy because much younger women can also identify with her. The second thing is that often, the character considered neutral OR universal he is a white man, between 30 and 40 years old, middle class.

I ask myself the question: why don’t men identify with women? Upon reflection, I realized that was why women are always fictional characters. They are often characters written by men and above all, those who don’t have it no density. They are limited to specific functions and are based on the main male character. Their depth remains unexplored.

It is for this reason that by creating dense female characters, who reflect on the world, men will gradually identify with them. This is political work to which it tends equality of views on a human beingman or woman.

We read a lot in the press that Simple comme Sylvain is “a romantic comedy with a social aspect”. It’s true, but it’s very reductive. In reality it is a film that tells the story of the impossibility for an intelligent, funny and sensual woman to find a man who fulfills her. Sylvain is passionate, emotionally committed but intellectually limited, Xavier is intelligent but a bit boring: only Sophia is all these things at the same time…

Exactly. I think that women have a much greater ability to adapt and develop their personality than men. This is not their nature but it is acquired: they are expected to have a richer personality to be able to compete in this worldWhile the men are at home. The world is their home. They are less encouraged to make efforts, to adapt. They are more radical when it comes to saying things like “I am like this and I won’t change”, ” I do not do it I’m not emotionally available.”.

It comes from their upbringing. They are caught in the trap of not being able to express themselves. On the contrary, women we are educated to express ourselves and take care of others, of others.

This is particularly why all questions related to the gender deconstruction they are extremely interesting. To me, the fact that more and more young people are saying they are non-binary speaks to their awareness of this domain. For them it is not a question of denying biology but of saying “I don’t adhere to what I was raised to believe; I can cry if I’m a man or scream if I’m angry as a woman, without being told I’m hysterical. » It’s once we understand it that we are able to build healthier romantic and sexual relationships.

Sexuality tells a lot about what we experience in our social lifethe way we are socially educated and the way we present ourselves to the world. Our performative relationship with sexuality tells of inequalities, traumasand this injunction for women to adapt. I am thinking in particular of the sequence of sex on a leash, where Sophia asks to be dominated, submissive so as not to humiliate her virility. All heterosexual women have already experienced this scene at least once: submitting so as not to humiliate a man’s virility, while men are taught to be sexually strong, to dominate.

The sex scenes in Simple comme Sylvain tell so many things that, watching the film, we can say to ourselves that if we edited it keeping only the sex scenes, we would tell the same thing. They tell the film.

YES. I write sex scenes as dialogue scenes. They move the story forward. I’m not interested in filming sex: what interests me is knowing what goes on in the characters’ heads, how the scene promotes their psychological development. We don’t care about seeing a naked girl, we don’t care about seeing people sleeping together, we’ve already seen millions of them. The interest is to ask what is said in the film.

Let’s talk about the last shot of the film. Until this final sequence, Sophia never stops thinking about a man, running away from one, running after another, thinking about one, thinking about the other… This last shot is ultimately the first in which she is finally alone with herself, as if she was finally starting to exist without defining herself through a man. What does this ending mean to you?

Exactly. She stops defining her happiness through the prism of the romantic relationship. We have been raised to believe that we can only be complete in a loving relationship.. I wanted Sophia to meet herself, she would love herself enough. Women constantly denigrate their bodies, their psyche, feeling incapable while men are not educated in this self-loathing.

How can we love and be loved properly if we are constantly denigrating ourselves? The first step in a romantic relationship is to love yourself to love the other as much as you love yourself. It also means stopping accepting behaviors that bully us. Loving yourself means being strong enough to do so accept your flaws, your weaknesses. It’s not being afraid show them to others, for fear that they would use them against us. That’s why I always knew this would be the end of my film.

Listen to Laisse-moi kiffer, Madmoizelle’s cultural advice podcast.