Sex Scene Challenge Directed by Your Best Friend…: 3 Secrets About Simple comme Sylvain Monia Chokri’s Social and Hot Rum

Simple as SylvainNow and exclusively in theaters.

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Sofia is a philosophy professor in Montreal and has lived with Xavier for 10 years. Sylvain is a carpenter in Laurentia and has to renovate their country house. When Sofia first meets Sylvain, it’s love at first sight. Opposites attract, but can it last?

A project that doesn’t date from yesterday…

Monia Chokri, who appeared in front of Xavier Dolan’s camera 10 years ago, started her career as a director in 2013 with a short film (Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire), and before that she touched on feature films. from 2019.

After Nanny in 2022, he returned with his 3rd film, Simple comme Sylvain, in which he deals with the theme of couples and love across social classes. A subject that he had in mind when he finished filming his first feature film.

I started structuring it when I finished My Brother’s Wife, so it’s been almost five years. At the time of my first feature film, I was still a bit of an actor, and then there was Nanny. I was resting (…). I see that this time I have taken as an ally.“

Best friends behind and in front of the camera

Monia Chokri chose Magalie Lépine-Blondeau to play her heroine, a forty-year-old girl living an orderly forty-year-old life, whose heart is captured by a strong and unexpected love passion. A very well-known actor in Canada, thanks to his roles on screen and in the theater, he notably starred in Michel Marc Bouchard’s play La Nuit, where Laurier-Gaudreau woke up, and in its adaptation signed to the series Xavier Dolan.

An actor that Monia Chokri knows very well because apart from directing her first short and first feature film, the director is also her best friend in life. On the contrary, this relationship did not bother the filmmaker in his production.

“I’m still quite directive, I set the actors in a certain tone and we practice a lot on set. But with Magalia we have the same taste, it’s simple. I also wanted to leave him completely freehe says. He has a special skill and I trusted him, he really wanted to protect this project, this character, this story..”

Filming sexuality on a female level

If it addresses issues of love through the prism of philosophy and allows us to enlighten the meanings of concepts such as couple or desire, Simple comme Sylvain also devotes a lot of space to bodies. Living in a separate room with the man she has shared her life with for 10 years, Sofia gets a devastating shock when she meets Sylvain. The attraction and evolution in her approach to sexuality, which Monia Chokri brings to the screen in abundance, but with a rather fresh perspective.

“There are so many sex scenes in cinema… I never really care about them, we always treat them in a graphic way. To me, they’re only good if they advance the story. He admits directly. It is quite difficult because we have been educated with a male view of eroticism and sensuality. We always say that a woman’s body is sensual and a man’s body is not sexy. This is another command to expose our female bodies.”

“My challenge was not to show the actor’s body, I wanted it to be his point of view. Then we have very close shots of Sylvain’s body. In the cunnilingus scene, he’s also the director (…) so I watched the sex scenes and the dialogue scenes.“