The French writer-director Thomas Cailley makes his feature debut with an engaging slow-burner of a comedy romance ( “romcom” hardly describes it), which first aired in the directors’ fortnight strand at last year’s Cannes film festival. It is a movie that takes its own sweet time to show its hand, or let the audience in on what it is centrally about. It grew on me. Adèle Haenel plays Madeleine, a bored and angry but callow college dropout in northern France who yearns to join the army; Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) is a young carpenter who falls in love with her while building a garden shed for her parents. To the astonishment of his brother and business partner, Arnaud enrols on Madeleine’s army bootcamp induction course, and the story progress from there. Things just roll along in this film and it is sometimes unclear where precisely they are supposed to be going; but the loose and unguided narrative style is seductive and the performances are engaging. The eerie emptiness of the northern countryside, evacuated after a forest fire, is a little like that evoked by Bruno Dumont. Cailley is a talent to watch.
