Quebec director Monia Chokri just beat out Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan, and she’s only getting started

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When Quebec director Monia Chokri took the stage to accept the Best Foreign Film prize at France’s César awards last week, she blurted out her first words in English.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Nolan,” the 41-year-old Quebec City native said before the crème de la crème of French cinema, who were gathered in Paris’s Olympia Theatre for France’s Oscars.

Also in the crowd was Christopher Nolan, whose film Oppenheimer had been considered a shoo-in for the César that Ms. Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain ended up winning in the biggest upset of the evening – and perhaps the entire 2024 awards season.

A stunned Ms. Chokri’s first words were an acknowledgment of the improbable feat she had just pulled off. But she had nothing to apologize for.

To be sure, Oppenheimer happens to be nominated for 13 Academy Awards. It cleaned up at the Golden Globes before running away with the top prizes at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Directors Guild of America Awards, Producers Guild of America Awards and Britain’s BAFTA Awards. And Mr. Nolan was awarded an honorary César in Paris for his life’s work.

Still, Ms. Chokri’s film charmed critics and audiences alike in France in a way that Oppenheimer, technical achievement that it is, never could. Simple comme Sylvain is a small movie – made with a budget of $7.5-million, compared to Oppenheimer’s US$100-million – about big philosophical questions as told through the lens of a romcom that forces you to think.

The film’s English title, The Nature of Love, makes it sound either off-puttingly pretentious or Hallmark Channel hokey. Simple comme Sylvain (Simple Like Sylvain), with its double-entendre mischievousness, better captures the movie’s essence.

Ms. Chokri’s film tells the story of an impossible relationship, owing mostly to class differences, that asks whether love really is only a social construction, after all. It manages to be hilariously burlesque and disarmingly serious at the same time.

Simple comme Sylvain is also a film that probably could only have been made in Quebec. Its incisive dialogue, its breathtaking cinematography showing off the Laurentians and Montreal in their best light, and its genre-bending mix of highbrow and lowbrow comedy help explain why French critics were smitten with the film, which is quite unlike anything that has ever come out of their country. Its success is also a testimony to the Quebec film ecosystem in which Ms. Chokri came up.

More than half of Simple comme Sylvain’s budget came from Quebec’s Société de développement des entreprises culturelles, which provided $2.5-million, and Telefilm Canada, which ponied up $1.8-million. Together, the two agencies have ensured that the pipeline of Quebec-made films never dries up for lack of funding.

And unlike in English Canada, where audiences for domestic movies are thin to non-existent, Quebec films score at the local box office. In 2023, six Quebec-made movies generated more than $1-million each in box-office revenues in the province, led by director Louise Archambault’s Le temps d’un été ($2.2-million), Denys Arcand’s Testament ($1.75-million) and Anik Jean’s Les hommes de ma mère ($1.7-million).

While such figures do not match those from popular successes of the pre-streaming era such as 2006′s Bon Cop, Bad Cop, which grossed more than $9-million at the Quebec box office, they are the envy of English-Canadian filmmakers who struggle just to get their movies shown on the big screen.

Simple comme Sylvain made about $1.2-million at the Quebec box office last fall before going on to gross about four times that amount in France. Overall, Quebec-made movies grossed more than $16.6-million in 2023, or about 10.2 per cent of the $164-million in provincewide box-office revenues generated last year, according to film data firm Cinéac. That was up from a 7.3-per-cent market share in 2022, as moviegoers returned in larger numbers to the theatres after the pandemic.

Before Ms. Chokri’s triumph in France, the only other Quebec-made movie to win Best Foreign Film at the Césars was Xavier Dolan’s Mommy in 2015. In 2004, Mr. Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions won the Césars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, before going on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a feat no other Quebec filmmaker has matched.

Yet. Ms. Chokri, the daughter of a Tunisian father and Québécoise mother, is just getting started. Simple comme Sylvain is just her third feature film as a director after starting out acting in films made by Mr. Arcand and Mr. Dolan. In the movie, she plays the main female protagonist’s best friend and steals most of the scenes in which she appears.

She finished her César acceptance speech, with the orchestra striking up as if to nudge her off the stage, by declaring: “I can say, today, that the life I have is grander than the one I dreamed of having.”

Sorry Mr. Nolan, indeed.