Love At First Fight

Debut director Thomas Cailley’s modest film, which he wrote with Claude Le Pape, about a diffident teenager Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs), who joins an army boot camp in  order to get close to a feistily independent girl Madeleine (Adèle Haenel), who is fixated with preparing for the end of days is a charming and original effort that tends to lose those qualities in the final stages but even so remains a likeable affair and makes for a refreshing change from the usual French fare that we get to see.

Haenel who won a César for Best Actress, beating out Juliette Binoche and Marion Cotillard, no mean feat in anyone’s book, particularly for someone so young, is wonderful as the sullen tough nut whose veneer of  don't touch independence is worn down by Arnaud’s puppy dog devotion. The first two-thirds of the film are quite marvellous with in the first section Madeleine defying Arnaud’s every expectation about how a girl should behave, then struggling to maintain her self-styled superiority over males at the boot camp.  Then, the pair go AWOL and there is a delightful idyll in which the two become like kids camping out in the woods and where eventually breaks out. This turns serious in the final stage as Madeleine becomes sick from eating fox meat and the pair narrowly escape being caught in a bushfire.

The turn of events is a clever echo of Madeleine prognostications of apocalyptical doom at the beginning of the film although some may with good reason see the fact that it is Arnaud who saves the day by carrying Madeleine to safety a rather disappointing denouement after such a promising start in reversing the usual gender roles.  There is also some early material about France being, at least for young people, a moribund culture but this fails to gain any purchase and is eventually forgotten about.

Despite this, Les Combattants is a sweet romance that stays well short of the saccharine and makes for a genial pastime.

 

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