Les gardiennes

A war film about the women left behind to struggle to work the land, with a classic tale of class, love and rejection, and final survival.

The film follows the rhythms of the farming year with the most gorgeous photography, lingering on details, faces, animals. I usually like films to have pace, but this one is most rewarding without that, and has strong emotional heft. The passion for the land runs deep both in rural areas, and French literature, and finds its cinematic expression here, notably at the end. The grief and anguish as telegrams come of death and capture Is finely portrayed.

Francine, the hard working orphan , well played, attracts our sympathy and support . If Hortense, the widowed farm owner, is a strong character, Francine is even more so, a survivor.

Xavier Beauvois back in the 1990's made a very good film ' N'oublie pas que tu vas Mourir '. I saw it at a Florence film festival and was impressed especially as it approached the subject of AIDS from a heterosexual perspective. AIDs, drugs in Amsterdam and the former Yugoslavian civil wars was quite a combination, and for me it worked. It was stark and not made as a crowd pleaser and I admired him for it. I have lost track of his work since then, but after being on the shelf for a while I watched ' Les Gardiennes '. At first I was impressed by the routine lives set in rural France during WW1 and how the women coped with their lives, fathers and sons fighting. But as the film progressed I got bored with the prettiness of the photography and also the music which was bland given the subject matter. The central point of interest was the predicament of the character played very well by Iris Bry, and her unfair endurance at the hands of a so called ' normal ' family. Keeping the family together at all brutal costs is not in my code of existence, and Nathalie Baye ( excellent as always ) as the mother turned from understandable grief at the loss of a son to a moral monster. The young woman's predicament was distantly related to Thomas Hardy's ' Tess of the D'Urbervilles ' and her resilience similar, although fortunately she does not end up on the gallows. All the same the complicit togetherness of the family structure fortified by the mother repelled me, and the last scene of the film with its perfunctory open ended optimism stretched endurance to its limit. Overall the film seemed swamped by its ' beauty ' and no doubt many have liked that approach. The brief and truthfully shown war scene where all men on either side are seen as equals in the needlessly cruel hands of those who caused it was excellently portrayed. The pity of war was apparent. The pitiless huddling together of the remaining ' family ' was not. A 6 for the portrayal of the cyclic seasons and the long painful years which is rarely done in the cinema, and with less picture postcard photography and a less barbaric family I could have given it a 10.

Xavier Beauvois's film 'The Guardians' tells the story of a rural French family left behind during the First World War while the young menfolk are off fighting at the front. It's a quiet and observational movie, watching the rhythms of the agricultural calendar while human life is in some senses on hold. Unfortunately, the conceit is rather overdone: in six years, we see almost no signs of joy or even simple boisterousness, as if the war shifted everyone into a permanent state of dignified melancholy. The result is a overly slow and solemn story.

I was smitten by Iris Bry as Francine and entranced by the film, thinking about French landscape from a different point of view in those war years. If you love film, sit back and enjoy a wonderful story that differs from the usual WW1fare.

"Two years of hell, some people went mad." "After the war, it will be different." Constant (Nicolas Girard)

The WWI soldier, Constant, in director Xavier Beauvois' The Guardians, captures the ambivalence of the "the war to end all wars": combat insanity that comes home with soldiers and the hopeless hope the world will be a better place. The only "better" is the film's depiction of strong women taking the reins of a farm, modernizing it and making a profit.

It's a small village whose story begins in 1915 and ends in 1920 in rural France, just long enough for women to take prominent places in the farms at home and for their returning men to find adjustment a challenge as they carry the memories of unspeakable horrors in the trenches of that "great war."

Hortense (Nathalie Bye), an aging owner of a working farm, rides the plow while she attends to the politics of the large farm without the crutch of a domineering male. She does well enough to engage the services of a young maid, Francine (Iris Bry), who is a change agent for Hortense and her soldier son and a signal of the complications war brings to the world.

The cinematography is a perfect reflection of the tranquil country side lost in a trance of bucolic tasks until the war's change agents arrive. Leave it to French cinema to languish over faces and landscapes, as if Manet or Constable were the artistic director. The slowly panning shots of laborers are as softly powerful as paintings in the camera's movement.

The Guardians is one of the most beautifully photographed and quietly told stories of women abiding the tyranny of war with an aplomb unseen in modern cinema. This minimalist epic is one of the year's best films and an appropriate emblem of the French ability to make cinema art. All other cinema pales by comparison.