Love at First Fight / Les Combattants

There’s an unsettling streak of casual brutality running through Thomas Cailley’s impressive feature debut – tellingly, the film’s French title, Les Combattants (The Fighters) forgoes any mention of love (along with any unfortunate puns). A multi-award winner at this year’s Cannes festival, it’s a romantic comedy refreshingly light on the bullshit tropes of the genre. Instead of just the requisite verbal sparring, arm biting, hand-to-hand combat, a pragmatic acceptance of the general cruelty of nature and the conflict of self-preservation versus social duty are added to the mix. If ultimately the film comes down on the side of self-sacrifice in the name of love, it takes a dark, near-apocalyptic path to get there.

After the death of his father, Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs), a directionless young landscaper in a sleepy French resort town, is forced to take over the family business with his brother. But he’d much rather spend his time hanging out on the beach, where he meets the survival-obsessed Madeleine (Adèle Haenel). When Madeleine soundly beats Arnaud in a military fighting exercise, he’s humiliated, but obviously smitten. Soon, Arnaud abandons his familial duties in order to follow Madeleine to military training camp.

The film’s dark undercurrent is leavened by its charmingly daft characterisations; the near-feral Madeleine, who at one point puts an entire fish in a blender and drinks it like a smoothie as part of her survivalist training, is disappointed that the military camp is too cushy. Cailley satirises the new economic reality (the army is identified as the second-largest employment recruiter in France, after McDonald’s), the senseless hive mind of the military, and the cultish individualism of survivalists in equal measure. He also suggests that both life and love are full of uncertainty, confusion, and struggle. That they’re worth it in the end is entirely dependent on how much dog we choose to put in the fight.

Channel Hopping: Our Preview of French Film Festival 2014