La femme de mon frère opens to a combative discussion between four philosophy professors about whether they should pass a doctoral student’s thesis. The sole woman of the group leads with cold, biting authority. It’s not a revolutionary contribution to the scholarship, she asserts. An older white-haired man we assume to be the thesis advisor in question asks her how many of her students have produced “revolutionary scholarship”? As the conversation heats up, lines are drawn in the sand. Unnamed Faculty Member Three, a droopy skeleton of a man who looks like he’s somewhere in his nineties, sides with the woman while Unnamed Faculty Member Four, a cheery, bald bespectacled man who resembles Michel Foucault giggles along with the advisor. Cursory discussion of the thesis quickly becomes a spectacular ego war, which in turn ends in a colossal fight among the faculty about who has the most unimpeachable personal life. The woman storms out; her ally, the nonagenarian, shuffling slowly behind. Quasi-Foucault laughs. The advisor looks out onto the stage and mutters sexist insults. Finally, the camera pans out to our protagonist, a graduate student in political philosophy, in visible discomfort. She’s been there the whole time. I have never seen a better and more summary depiction of the petty tyranny of academia.
Sophia (Anne-Élisabeth Bossé), the stubborn protagonist of Monia Chokri’s debut comedy, after this opening comedy of egos but this isn’t the victory she thought it would be. She’s in her thirties, living in Québec, and after eight years of intensive study, she’s still not got the faculty job she craved. (The position, we find out, went to the son of her thesis advisor instead.) Now, working as a tour guide at an amateur community art gallery, Sophia has temporarily moved in with her brother Karim (Patrick Hivon), a successful psychologist at the Ministry of Economics. Their friendship is intensely silly and very rewarding to watch – conversations are peppered with “would you rather” hypotheticals that range from the grotesque to the absurd. Sophie’s friends are all married with young kids, and so her life orbits entirely around Karim. Hyper-educated, underemployed, licking her wounds from a failed relationship with – as her friend puts it – “a skater over the age of 30”, she spends her spare time sitting alone watching game show reruns and interviews with the Kardashians. She doesn’t need a romantic partner anyway – Karim provides enough company. They do everything together, including going to a clinic for Sophia’s abortion. Once there they have to clarify to the doctor that they are not a couple, only brother and sister. Later, a lethargic Sophia, recovering in the hospital waiting room, tells Karim that he should consider dating a woman like the doctor. He’s already got her number. “No”, she whines, “I meant a woman like her. Not… her.”
Eloïse (Evelyne Brochu), Karim’s new girlfriend, is Sophia’s nightmare. She is beautiful, well-adjusted, and the kind of woman who goes jogging whenever she feels a “hint of depression” (though, as she tells Sophia, she rarely does). Sophia hates her. Disappointed with her professional and personal life, only two beliefs protect Sophia’s ailing self-esteem: that she is the most important person in her brother’s life, and that every terrible thing that happens to her does so because she is smarter, more knowing, and more interesting than other people. Eloïse challenges both those assumptions. Karim, deeply in love, ignores Sophia’s increasingly juvenile provocations, but when they all go out for a dinner and Eloïse brings up Foucault in conversation, Sophia sees a chance for blood. – she did not spend eight years getting a doctorate in political philosophy only to pass up the chance to put down charlatans! When the doctor proves that she knows her stuff, it feels like slap in the face to Sophia, something that breaks an unspoken cosmic rule: her intellectualism cannot be blamed for her narcissistic self-destructive lifestyle; the latter is a choice. She leaves the dinner table to emit a guttural, lonely scream in the bathroom.
Despite its smatterings of high theory, La femme de mon frère is much more interested in the primal and intuitive functions of familial love. Some of the best scenes involve Karim and Sophia with their easy-going parents. Her father is, in her words, an “ex-communist who plays about the stock market” using his government pension, while her mother is a lively woman who does not shy away from discussing her sex life at the dinner table. When Sophia explains her doctoral thesis to Eloïse’s clumsy but loveable best friend – about, as she puts it, Antonio Gramsci’s belief that a truly meaningful politics ought to begin with establishing familial ties with others – you see Chokri tipping her own hand. Her debut film celebrates the relationships we share with our families, or the families we fashion up, exploring how the bonds we make with other people can have a transformative significance that goes beyond ourselves. When a whirlwind almost-romance with a woman she meets at a party reaches an upsetting, premature end, Sophia realises she needs to pick up the pieces of her life. La Femme de mon frère falters a little here, disintegrating into montages of Sophia in her new job where she teaches French to immigrants, and her blossoming new relationship. The film posits that depressive world-hating irony is easy, and so you wish it engaged with Sophia a little more as she moved beyond it, rather than invoking common narratives of westerners finding themselves through realising the hardships of “the subaltern” and the ecstasies of romantic love. Yet Chokri’s full and painstakingly humanising character study of her protagonist means that Sophia’s transformation still feels like a victory. “We’re not young, not old – what are we then?” asks one of her friends as they enjoy a night out at the club. Existing in limbo can be incredibly lonely, as you wait for life to happen to you. La femme de mon frère asks whether that waiting may in fact be life itself, and celebrates the fact that we don’t have to wait alone.
Rebecca Liu is digital assistant at Prospect and one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
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