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Cannes Conversations — Monia Chokri on THE NATURE OF LOVE · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, audio listeners, you're about to hear a videotaped conversation.
• 0:04
  For the full experience you'll find the video version of this episode on Spotify or YouTube.
• 0:13
  Yeah, you wanna...
• 0:14
  Hi! That's either a braying cat or a seagull.
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  This is the most Cannes thing that ever happened.
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  It's kind of great.
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  If you can just fly in with a laurel, that would be pretty sweet.
• 0:27
  - Good.
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  - Sorry.
• 0:28
  It's a you know, it's a the dance of love for animals.
• 0:34
  That is Cannes winning Quebecois actor, writer and director Monia Chokri.
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  And in the film she's made she actually spends a lot of time thinking about how us human animals dance out of, around, and into love.
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  At this year's Cannes Film Festival, she debuted her movie, The Nature of Love.
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  It's the story of Sophia, a comfortably married college professor who finds herself falling for her super hot handyman.
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  It's a funny, thoughtful movie about pursuing joy, even when you're not supposed to.
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  It was one of the best reviewed films of the festival.
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  And on a rainy day at a rooftop cafe, we stole a few minutes to talk about it.
• 1:08
  I'm Rico Gagliano.
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  This is the MUBI Podcast.
• 1:11
  Welcome back to our special season of conversations from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
• 1:23
  This is episode three, Monia Chokri on The Nature of Love.
• 1:28
  - Hi. Lovely to talk to you.
• 1:28
  - Hi! Welcome to sunny Cannes.
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  Oh, but rainy Cannes is a funny Cannes, they say.
• 1:35
  - What?
• 1:35
  - Rainy Cannes, funny Cannes.
• 1:37
  - This is a saying?
• 1:37
  - No.
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  I just I just made up this.
• 1:41
  - You should get T-shirts made.
• 1:41
  - Yeah.
• 1:44
  Let's talk about your movie,The Nature of Love.
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  You have said that, so in the press kit for this thing you said, "This is like an obsessive"theme of mine, which is the impossible search for love."- Yeah.
• 1:55
  - Why are you obsessed with that theme?
• 1:58
  I don't know.
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  I should ask my shrink about that.
• 2:00
  I'm asking you now.
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  This is a great time to delve deeply into it.
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  I think there's two obsession that, and I'm...
• 2:07
  appears in my in my writing.
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  The impossibility of love or like, the thing that block love and also like classes, social classes in my first film it was like the relationship with immigration and this one is like really like different social classes.
• 2:23
  I don't know, I think it's a, it's a good way of making drama, also.
• 2:27
  To talk about the impossibility.
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  And it's also, it happens, it appears a lot in this film that actually it's not love that disturb me but it's the structure of couples.
• 2:40
  Oh? That disturbs you, literally like you...
• 2:42
  Yeah, I mean, I think I started to write this film almost five, or six, yeah, five or four years ago.
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  And I was myself, like, struggling a lot with this concept of couple.
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  Like, I find it very like, choking in my life to to, to be in this state of couple, but.
• 3:00
  Like a monogamous couple relationship, even?
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  - Or any couple?
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  - Any couple, you know, like...
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  the relationship with desire, with her having children, or not, that this economical structure of the couple too. You know when you meet someone like the, in the western world is like you have like a really nice specific path, you know, you say oh at one day I went, well you like, you're going to travel together.
• 3:25
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
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  We made our first travel together.
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  Oh we went to IKEA together.
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  Oh, we buy a house together.
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  Oh, we're going to buy a country house together.
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  Oh, we're going to have children, you know.
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  IKEA as a milestone of a relationship.
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  That's so true.
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  So, yeah. And you see, like those couple with babies at IKEA, they're like, like, tired and like, they can't, like, stand each other, but, like, they have to stay in this because it's been a long time and you are afraid to, like, choose like your own desire.
• 3:54
  Maybe like, you see somewhere else if something better happens to you, you know?
• 3:59
  But why then, because it is an impossibility, right?
• 4:02
  That sounds to me like tragedy.
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  You're never going to achieve this thing.
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  But you often are attacking it with comedy.
• 4:08
  - Yeah.
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  - Why comedy?
• 4:10
  I think, it's my way also to, uh, to see world, you know, like I write, I can't, like, help myself to not put a little bit of glimpse of comedy in my film.
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  You know, it's the way I see world, you know, it's, um...
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  I am admire a lot Chekhov, do that a lot in his own writing to...
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  to travel between drama and comedy, because life is like that too.
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  Life is sometimes dramatic, sometimes funny.
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  And you can, like, manage and balance yourself in this world, you know, and navigate in this world of like some...
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  And we say that comedy is drama plus time, you know.
• 4:46
  - That's true.
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  - So.
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  There's something that also appears in a lot of your films.
• 4:51
  They're not just people that are in search of possible love, they're often specifically academics in search of impossible love.
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  Because you've got a philosophy professor in this one,Brother's Love is a sociology PhD.
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  - Is that right?
• 5:03
  - Yeah, er yeah.
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  - Philosophic, social PhD.
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  - So also philosophy.
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  - Yeah.
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  - Why academics?
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  And in my-my short was played actually by Magalie the main character, she was doing her PhD.
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  - Yeah right.
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  - So I...
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  My character evolves, like, in the academic world, you know.
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  - It's nice.
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  - The next one is going to be like, what, an emeritus professor?
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  - Like the master of the...
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  - The dean.
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  Yeah exactly.
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  But why?
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  Maybe because, like, I'm-I'm...
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  It's... I love to make a character, female characters who are the ability to think to express themselves in very like intellectual field, you know.
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  And philosophy is a good field.
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  I mean there's a lot of philosophy professor in film, you know, our professor in the history of, uh, making auteur film, you know, it's a good character because it's a character that express himself a lot.
• 6:05
  You know, it's was good for me to make her the position of Professor because she could like, make like, a narration of the film in an active way because I could film it, you know.
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  So, and she would apply what she's telling people in there, on like in the theory, there was like a fight between theory and application of this theory in real life, you know, in the film, so, but I don't know why.
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  I think it's just like, it's good to have like a female character who are like also in the university world.
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  And it's...
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  It's the fact that also now there's more women in the in university than men.
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  - So...
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  - True.
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  But I mean, to me, if I may impose something on you and you tell me it's I'm way off base, is like they're trying to achieve something that, love which is essentially non intellectual.
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  They've got like all the intellectual capacity, but it's not any easier on some level.
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  I think there's a line in one of your movies, it's like you're brilliant, but you're unemployable.
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  Or something like that.
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  It's like, you know, you...
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  You have all the yeah...
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  You have all those diploma, you're like, but you're too much.
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  You have too much diploma to be employed.
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  So yeah.
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  It's like in the same way as like you've got all the thoughts, but you don't,- you still can't work out the...
• 7:23
  - Yeah.
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  But it's also like a true situation and like in our society anyway, our, our French-Canadian society that the more and more you, and they feel alone like people are in university, but they feel that they won't have any achievements like at the end of the road in the work world, you know.
• 7:44
  Yeah. Last question for you.
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  Yesterday, this was just translated to me, because I'm sorry, I do not speak French, but your beautiful speech before your film, before introducing your film, which was sort of about the responsibility of filmmakers really quickly for non French speakers, what what was the gist of what you were getting at? The idea of genius, I guess in cinema.
• 8:07
  I navigate between France and Quebec and in Canada, so I live about a territory and so I...
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  in our culture we have a sense of respect.
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  You know, we dialog with people and, and we are, yeah, we are, we denigrate violence and aggressivity.
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  And we don't agree with power mixed with being that would break people you know.
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  So, and I knew that there was this manifesto that people would, I was aware that there was this manifesto that that came right before Cannes against the festival and also the polemic with Maiwenn, with Johnny Depp, with Edwy Plenel, with...
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  So and since I'm like part of also this this French industry, I think I had to position myself and I wanted to position myself with...
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  with kind of a glimpse of brightness, you know, and say, you know what, let's let's come back to the roots and the roots is that just being respectful.
• 9:18
  And power is something that should, comes with the responsibility of make people feel-feel all right.
• 9:28
  Monia Chokri, at the end there she was talking about some Time's Up style controversies surrounding this year's festival.
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  Highly recommend you check out her speech.
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  And also her movie, The Nature of Love.
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  Look for it later this year.
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  This episode of the movie podcast was hosted and written by me, Rico Gagliano.
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  Ciara McEniff produced along with Elodie Fagan and Josefina Perez-Portillo.
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  Prachi Mokashi edited the show, and Michelle Cho is our supervising editor.
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  Yuri Suzuki composed our theme music.
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  Our camera crew in Cannes included Cédric Hazard, Alice Desplats, Rob Godfrey, Solal Coulon and Mathis Toti.
• 10:01
  Special thanks to MUBI's additional team in Cannes, Eric Issenberg, Sam Leter, and Ilyass Malki.
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  This series is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 10:12
  And of course, to stream the best in cinema, head over to MUBI.com to start watching.
• 10:17
  Next episode, a downright delightful conversation with filmmaker Weston Razooli.
• 10:21
  His debut Cannes film Riddle Of Fire, is like if Francois Truffaut remade The Goonies.
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  Follow us so you don't miss it, till then, fun fact Cannes is super close to Italy.
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  You can find really good pizza there.