Love at First Fight (French version)

Arnaud, facing an uncertain future and a dearth of choices in a small French coastal town, meets and falls for the apocalyptic-minded Madeleine, who joins an army boot camp to learn military and survival skills to prepare for the upcoming environmental collapse. Intrigued and excited by Madeleine’s wild ideas, Arnaud signs up for the boot camp himself. They soon realize that the boot camp is harder than they’d imagined, but the experience nonetheless cements them together as the couple continues to explore their young love. “Falling in love in the movies is rarely as unexpectedly violent and hesitant as in “Love at First Sight”. One of the reasons for this is that the protagonists do not wait for love and are not prepared for romance. Or, as 35-year-old French director Thomas Cailley puts it: his first movie is a mixture of “Casablanca” (fd 19 478) and “Rambo” The second part of the film has a fairytale feel to it. The images from the (supposedly) remote forests of Aquitaine are dreamlike, the deserted town in which Madeleine and Arnaud are stranded in dire straits is the kind of somewhere (or nowhere) you sometimes encounter in westerns or SF films; a place where dying is just as much a possibility as survival or love. Cailley and his co-author Claude Le Pape worked on the screenplay for over two years and wrote six versions. The film was shot strictly chronologically and without the actors rehearsing with each other beforehand, because Cailley wanted to preserve the magic of their encounter. The experiment was more than worthwhile. “Love at First Sight” is a uniquely idiosyncratic screen play, love story and survival story in one and full of quiet humor to boot.” (Irene Genhart, on: filmdienst.de)