Thomas Cailley's (Paris Shanghai 2011 and Baba Noël 2012) the low key romance of "Les Combattants" really starts in that impossible situation. We see Arnaud Labrède ( Kévin Azaïs) refusing to fight with his opponent, a girl Madeleine Beaulieu (Adèle Haenel ) because he thought it too insulting. But he doesn't know at all what he would be getting: a girl who has always wanted to become a soldier so that she would be able to learn all the survival skills she needs and be prepared to face the end of the world which she thinks might come any minute and who for such purposes has been incessantly training up herself physically by a punishing regime of food intake, training by running, and swimming and weight bearing. He is obviously no match for the girl until in the grid lock hold down in which he is overpowered, he snatches a last minute victory by biting her ear! The girl hates him. The effects of such an affront to her ego lasts for quite a while so she continues to ignore Arnaud until both of them are accepted for that boot camp.
Arnaud is actually a teenager whose father, a carpenter, just died and he's in the middle of a a summer vacation having no plans in particular except to help learn the family business now run by his elder brother who doubles up as a landscape carpenter. He's therefore most surprised to see Madeleine again swimming in the garden where her parents had ordered a wooden cabin to be built beside the pool. So engrossed was Madeleine with her daily training that she forgot the last date for enrolling for the army boot camp. When Arnaud learned about that, he offered to take her on his motor bike to the registration booth in the next town, an offer she instantly accepted. As he was there, Arnaud thought that he would join too since he could always opt out without having to pay for any fine as he too was mildly interested in the idea of learning some useful skills like learning how to drive a truck etc. whilst Madeleine. a wealthy college student with a degree in economics and an environmentalist, wanted to learn telecommunications. Then the two went through a course in survival training during which unexpectedly a huge forest fire broke out and wiped out an entire town and in which Arnaud had to carry her to safety for an immense distance as Madeleine got sick and fainted. When he found that help in the form of the headlights of a search vehicle in the smoke filled street, he collapsed. After they recovered in hospital, we see them side by side.
The cinematography was excellent. So were the acting of the Kévin Azaïs as the shy, plain bu caring young boy Arnaud and Adèle Haenel as the cool, strong minded and tom boyish aspiring woman soldier Madeleine who finally succumbed to the caring but unarticutive charms of Arnaud.. The chemistry somehow got right, despite differences of age, educational and social background. But is not human history full of examples of how love can bloom in the most unlikely places!
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