Love at First Fight (2014)

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I saw this movie with my high school (I'm French, so I apologize if I make any languages mistakes), and really liked it. The actors really did a great job, and during the whole movie, their acting seemed really natural. The characters have very different points of view on the future and group life. Madeleine is trying to be self-sufficient in expectation of the apocalyptic future she believes in. To Arnaud, future means the end of the summer, and in the first part of the movie, his family takes the decisions for him. Even though, their love-story is believable, and Adèle Haenel and Kevin Azaïs made a great on-screen couple ! Also, the score is really lively and goes well with the movie. This movie is very different of most of the recent French movies, and it's a good thing if it worked, I hope it will stimulate others French directors to make different movies.A really good first long time feature for Thomas Cailley, and I encourage everyone to see "Love at first fight" ! To me, it doesn't deserve a 8 or more out of 10, but this is a different movie from what we are used to see. Sometimes, this movie is a comedy, or a rom com, but it also is a movie about the army and the survival in a wild place.

I don't even know how much this film falls under the "rom-com" category, although it is classified as one. There are comic elements as much as in real life, so nothing that emphasized or exaggerated. The guy's crush on the girl is evident pretty soon, because he takes every chance he gets to be in her company. The girl on the other hand is cold towards him and understandably so, since they met on bad terms (hence the English translation of the title, love at first fight). The girl is a cold person in general, at least until you get to know her better. I don't think it was actually love at first fight. But I do think they were interested in one another when the fight was sprung onto them. It was both exciting and humiliating (mostly for the guy). I think he was preoccupied with thoughts of the girl because it was a weird and uncommon experience for him. She intrigued him. And so when the girl's parents hired the guy to build them a shed next to their house, it was an irresistible opportunity to observe the 'eccentric' girl and get closer to her. Honestly, the girl had issues with anger management, she felt self-entitled and was downright mean sometimes. Stubborn, also. I like that she 'took no sh*t' and it was admirable how persistent she was in learning survival. She was preparing herself in case of a world crisis. And it's not even 'in case' anymore. It's just a matter of when and what will come first, and will it catch us in our lifetime. Although the boot camp was a joke in opposition to what she came for, the concept of something like a survival course attracted me. The movie also shows us how dangerous living alone can be, and how hard "passing the time" can be, unless you're with someone you're attracted to :) There was only one intimate scene and one sudden kiss some time before it. They never became a giggly and gooey couple, it's not in their nature. I think that the guy is tougher than he seems and the girl is 'softer' than she seems. They just take a different approach towards things. The guy is more easy going and passionate, he has his head in the clouds and is easily influenced. He's a nice guy. The girl keeps to herself and is more goal-orientated, and in doing so is passive in other aspects of life. She has a 'dont mess with me' aura to her and she aspires to be tough. In my opinion, they complement each other well. They bring out the stuff that's less noticeable in one another. They went through some phases of negligence and got burned. Literally. But in the end, there's no denying they both had a lot of fun and learned some good lessons. French films hardly ever disappoint. Something worth noting is that this film has an original soundtrack and it's pretty cool. I'd recommend this movie if you're looking for something 'light'. As in, not so extreme that you'll cry your eyes out, or be filled with hate and fear, and not so sappy that it kills brain cells. 10 - 3 because the acting wasn't that good. That's usually how it is with two people who like each other. It's mostly them goggling at one another. I didn't feel that much passion between them. The culmination of course was their scene of intimacy. I have to admit it got my heart beating faster and some other things haha I'm sorry for constantly referring to them as 'the guy' and 'the girl', I forgot their names and didn't think it would be that significant. That's that.

Les Combattants (2014) makes an interesting connection. The battle of young adolescents with love and society versus the real, physical battle in the army. The battle is larded with physical craving and inexplicable attraction. What do I feel? Why do I like this girl? Why do I want to make love to that boy? The enemy is in both cases invisible but palpable. Les Combattants shows that the army, in which everything is based on rules and hierarchy, is not natural. People follow a different path.Madeleine is fixated on being fit, on exhaustion. She swims with two roof tiles in a backpack across the bottom of the sea. She wants to join the army for the tough, physical challenges. After the death of his father Arnaud and his brother continue his gardening business. He meets Madeleine for the first time during a wrestling contest at the beach, which is spontaneously organized by the army as promotion. She overpowers him and Arnaud can only free himself by biting her. It is indeed love at first fight.Arnaud follows Madeleine in the army for a trial period. They fight their own battle and end up surviving together in the woods. Building a shelter, catching fish, making fire ... So they really get together and make love. When Madeleine gets sick, Arnaud rescues her. They survive, literally and figuratively speaking. Adele Haenel is an interesting actress. She gets on well with the role as the headstrong, naive young woman Madeleine. Kevin Azais plays also fine as masculine, loyal Arnaud. A coming-of-age film threatens to get bogged down quickly in clichés. Director Thomas Cailley proves in his feature debut, that you can do well on themes that are not original.

Trying to balance his summer like many of us do, between working and spending time with friends, Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) seems largely fixated on this balance over anything romantic or more substantial during his vacation. A wrench in his plan comes in the form of Madeleine (Adèle Haenel), a beautiful and uncommonly athletic woman. Her toned muscles, gorgeous and structured physique, and complete and total self-confidence in herself and her ideas instantly makes her attractive to Arnaud. As he talks to her, whilst doing oddjobs around her home, he begins to realize that she is more original than she lets on; Madeleine is a survivalist, hellbent on being prepared for, what she believes, is an imminent apocalypse destined to wipe out planet Earth and life as we know it. Madeleine prides herself on being one step ahead of everyone around her, and, similar to the way she handles herself, she doesn't really care if you disapprove or can't keep up with her speed.Arnaud, on the other hand, I feel, embodies a lot of us. He's not carefree, but simply minded in the present. He wants to work to get enough money to do the things he'd like with his friends and it's that simple motivation that gets him in and out of bed each morning. Madeleine's discussion about end times and doomsday prophecies is likely the first time he has ever even considered the possibility of life as he knows it changing in the blink of an eye. He decides to try and school himself by joining Madeleine at a reserve camp of sorts, which will prepare her for the army and her ship date, which is right around the corner. Here, Arnaud will push himself to physical and mental limits, proving to himself and the one he is rapidly falling in love with that he's capable of looking at a bigger picture and committing himself to something rather than letting the world pass by around him.Thomas Cailley's "Love at First Fight" is rather impressive on a structural note, due to the fact that, as it carries itself, its genre does a full one-eighty. In the very beginning, the film plays like the opening of a Nicholas Sparks film, only a tad moodier, whereas, by the forty-five minute mark, and eventually when the remainder of the film is set at the reserve camp, it becomes a survivalist thriller of sorts. This duality comes off as ostensibly uneven and far-fetched for a film like this, but writer/director Cailley finds a way to make it work because he doesn't rush the development or pace of the film. He moves carefully, illustrating the way characters move and the manner in which they speak, making sure we get the nuances examined before we can even think about jumping ship to another genre.It's a tricky tactic he handles with serious screen writing conviction, but it would've been nothing without solid performers, which is where Azaïs and Haenel come in. Both young talents exhibit serious acting jobs, though the standout is definitely Haenel. From the moment she steps on screen, you get the feeling that she's not your general idea of a romantic interest, and even by the end of the film, you're not convinced she was ever cut out to be anything other than her own independent woman. The fact that Cailley can etch her into a film like this and simultaneously give her and her character some respect, in addition to never cutting down Haenel's Madeleine's significance as a character is another serious win for the film at hand.I suppose the sole thing about "Love at First Fight" that had me underwhelmed was its lack of real connection or bite. The film is remarkably tame, especially when you consider other French romances, which throw ideas of political commentary or, at the very least, social ideas into the mix. While I'm not saying it's Cailley's obligation to layer a film with any of those things, it would've made for a more connective experience. In addition, given the fact that there's a bit less dialog between Arnaud and Madeleine that would be called revealing, there's a heavy reliance on a minimalist tone here, which hurts the film's ability to make a viewer connect with the characters at hand.Having said that, "Love at First Fight" does do some quiet subversion of a genre that has long disappointed, and fuels my point that if people want to see romance films with a bit more layeredness and themes, they'll need to seek out foreign films or the very, very independent films of American cinema, for mainstream American cinema, in this genre at least, is doing nobody any good.