Les Combattants review: engaging rom-com with a novel twist

Happily, the plans to market Thomas Cailley’s highly original French romantic comedy as “Love at First Fight” seem to have been shelved and the picture can journey out with the title under which it played to much success at 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

There are some cute meetings. A few lessons are learnt. But Les Combattants has the distinct advantage of looking and sounding like very few films in its debased genre.

Kévin Azaïs plays Arnaud, a young man fighting to maintain a carpentry business with his more interested older brother following the death of their father.

In the opening exchanges he rubs up against Madeleine (Adèle Haenel), the rebellious daughter of a middle- class family, whose only ambition is to join the army.

Initially, they don’t much get on, but sparks begin to fly when he follows her to a commando-training course in a forbidding part of the country.

It’s a nice idea for a comedy – a touch of role reversal – and the director finds tasty diversions to place at the film’s edges. The couple begin to bond over a lost ferret to whom the ruthless Madeleine brings frozen chicks.

Arnaud’s brother despairs at the younger man’s lack of commitment. Azaïs is convincing as a man who can’t quite process his own emotions. Haenel is rather brilliant as a woman concealing her own vulnerabilities behind a wall of aggression.

Les Combattants does, however, take some time to reach its proper destination: an adventure in the scorched wilderness that springs from an entirely different sort of film. The change in tone is welcome. We have seen more than enough French comedies that declared their destination in the opening frames.

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