THE Québécois director Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love (Cert. 15) raises numerous questions about what that is. The film is touching and often funny. Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), a middle-aged professor of philosophy, attends a dinner party with her husband, Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), whose guest compose paid-up members of the chattering classes. Cutting through all the male-dominated psychobabble, a woman gently suggests that love is the only universal value: cue for exploring this thesis.

Soon afterwards, Sophia visits their chalet to discuss renovations with Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a handsome, charismatic builder. Instantly swept off her feet, she begins a passionate affair alongside agonised enquiries into whether this equates with her understanding of love.

Sophia lectures on various philosophers’ ideas about the subject. Is love primarily desire, filling a need for something lacking, as Plato suggests? There is certainly something missing between Sophia and Xavier.

Sylvain accepts her as she is, unconditionally. An overwhelming carnal element drives this romance. In a morganatic coupling like theirs — she an intellectual academic, he a blue-collar worker who left school early — it is more a meeting of emotions than of minds. A line we hear from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire sums it up: “O my love, my grand folly”. Lady Chatterley even gets a mention when Sophia confides in a friend. Highlighting Schopenhauer, she speaks of love as allowing us to experience immortality. Sylvain, not Xavier, awakens her need to reproduce, to leave a trace of life.

Allied to this is Diderot’s notion of extinction denial. This new-found love’s exultant force opens new undreamt-of worlds for both lovers. The problem is that they live, as Sylvain notes, in two different worlds. He becomes unreasonably jealous, quickly feeling inferior. She begins trying to change him, correcting his grammar, for instance. Sophia informs her students of the distinction that Spinoza makes between desire and love, and tacitly acknowledges for herself that she could well despise the object of her longings.

This film is far more than a history of ideas. Real people face real issues in the art of loving. If anything, the notion of love is too confined to that of romance. Little do we see or hear of empathetic, filial, or agapeic love. Reference to Vladimir Jankélévitch’s work gets the closest to acknowledging these broader understandings. And there are enough hints that 1 Corinthians 13, although not receiving overt credit, underpins much of what occurs on screen. We may be left deciding for ourselves whether the couple’s horizons have been sufficiently challenged regarding what true love actually is.