Les Com­bat­tants

Debut French direc­tor Thomas Cail­ley has served up a Bear Grylls-inspired, absur­di­ty-hued rom-com with impend­ing-apoc­a­lyp­tic under­tones that give oth­er­wise ground­ed events a mag­i­cal real­ist gauze. Arnaud (Kévin Aza­ïs) and his old­er broth­er, Manu Labrède (Antoine Lau­rent) have just lost their dad and are work­ing hard to save his car­pen­try busi­ness. There’s a glo­ri­ous scene in a hard­ware store in which a cashier asks whether she should trans­fer their dad’s loy­al­ty points over to their account. Manu looks at Arnaud in a state of recoil. Arnaud shrugs, ​“Do it. They’ll be lost oth­er­wise.” And with that ele­gant log­ic, the remain­ing earth­ly spoils of their father are saved.

The broth­ers take on a job build­ing a shed for a cou­ple. The cou­ple have a daugh­ter, Madeleine (Adèle Haenel), that Arnaud has already met. He’s already bit­ten her, too. The bite hap­pened dur­ing an army-orches­trat­ed self-defence class. Only the two of them know that he bit her and she gets her own back by terse­ly tear­ing down his pro­fes­sion in front of her par­ents. Aza­ïs’ pan­ic-strick­en rab­bit-in-the-head­light looks are met by a hilar­i­ous­ly over-boiled glares from Haenel, which is a neat visu­al short­hand for how the ear­ly stages of their rela­tion­ship play out, thanks to their meet-not-cute.

Arnaud can’t look away and it’s easy to see why. Madeleine is not your aver­age young woman. Her all-con­sum­ing life goal is to be admit­ted into a spe­cial­ist army reg­i­ment. All utter­ances take the form of terse­ly infor­ma­tive barks and she stomps around her par­ents’ tran­quil home like a sol­dier hav­ing a bad day at the bar­racks. Manu and Arnaud watch agog as she packs roof tiles into a back­pack before leap­ing into a swim­ming pool wear­ing the back­pack. Cail­ley stretch­es out the com­ic beats, find­ing dead­pan humour in between the baf­fle­ment of every­one who meets this unapolo­get­i­cal­ly seri­ous beauty.

Madeleine is prepar­ing to sur­vive a dis­as­ter. The nature of the dis­as­ter that she ful­ly expects to sweep her peace­ful sea­side town is spelled out over din­ner at the Labrède house­hold. ​“Hunger strikes, reli­gious wars, drought, glob­al warm­ing, inver­sions of the poles, nuclear plants blow­ing up…” ​“We watch TV too,” sneers Manu but the charm of Les Com­bat­tants is that the lady’s not for turn­ing. A num­ber of well-chore­o­graphed fight sequences show that she’s nifty in a com­bat sit­u­a­tion even if she’s not ful­ly the Com­man­do fig­ure she aspires to be.

Haenel is a con­su­mate joy to watch. Her ingénue appeal is not sex­u­alised with Cail­ley instead draw­ing out the pow­er and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of a woman with con­vic­tion. The fact that every­one else thinks that her con­vic­tions are bat­shit crazy pro­vides humour but also fuel the ever-height­en­ing sense that as in Day­dream Nation, Don­nie Darko and The Craft we are head­ing towards an abstract, end-of-the-world spectacular.

What hap­pens is too under­de­vel­oped to make sense in its own right how­ev­er the cli­max func­tions per­fect­ly to resolve the rela­tion­ship arc. Les Com­bat­tants plays by its own mad­cap rules show­ing via two unusu­al lead char­ac­ters how roman­tic con­nec­tions involve an accep­tance of another’s con­cerns, no mat­ter how wild these may be.