The Nature of Love (French: Simple comme Sylvain) is a 2023 Canadian romantic comedy-drama film directed by Monia Chokri.

That is upended when she meets and is attracted to Sylvain, a blue-collar construction contractor whom the couple hires to renovate their summer home.

As Sophia, Magalie Lépine Blondeau (whom Chokri first directed ten years ago in her hugely successful short An Extraordinary Person) is wonderful, gifted with great comic timing and a particular knack for telegraphing that sense of someone who knows they’re making a huge mistake, but are compelled to go ahead and make it anyway.

But it’s hard to imagine Blondeau’s role working as well as it does without the right actor as Sylvain, the kind of guy whose compulsive sexual charm is enough, by itself, to swamp every other more cautious instinct.

It even suggests a canon of studies on romance – a topic equally neglected in philosophy and ethics – with quotes by the likes of Plato, bell hooks and Vladimir Jankélévitch, but without being didactic in any way.