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The Guardians
****
Dir: Xavier Beauvois
Starring: Nathalie Baye, Iris Bry
(France, 15, 2 hrs 18mins)
The Guardians takes place during World War 1, but this isn’t an action film and there’s little slaughter shown. The battles seem oceans away in this part of bucolic France, but the war is never far from everyone’s mind.
Opening in 1915 and spanning five years, as if a dream, the camera pans over bodies of soldiers with their ineffectual gas masks on (it’s significant that the only other war scene takes place within a nightmare). Then, we see a grey-haired woman is observed toiling in the fields; widowed Madame Hortense Sandrail (Nathalie Baye) head of the family farm. She and daughter Solange (Laura Smet) await the return of Hortense’s sons Constant (Nicolas Giraud) and Georges (Cyril Descours), and Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin), Solange’s husband, all of whom are fighting. In the meantime, the two women have been keeping the household and business solvent, despite the difficulties of lacking difficult able-bodied men.
Because of the shortage of help, Hortense hires 20-year-old Titian – tressed, emerald-eyed Francine (Iris Bry), who has skin the colour of milk but turns out to be a sturdy young woman, so Hortense extends Francine’s contract for another year. While on furlough, Georges meets Francine, and they begin to fall in love. Seasons pass and bad news arrives.
This is leisurely paced, but the plot picks up after midpoint and there are shocks. Towards the end of the war, someone unexpectedly betrays another in an act of snobbery and desperation to uphold the status quo and to save face. The idiom that blood is thicker than water rings bitterly true.
Director Xavier Beauvois tells what an arduous life the women have running things. Besides field work, there’s milking the cows, chopping firewood and everything in between. We see Hortense and Francine becoming more familiar – in a cozy kitchen scene, the older woman shows her how to shape homemade butter using various decorative molds.
Veteran actress Baye gives another secure performance as the determined matriarch who takes her position seriously and lets nothing stand in her way. Smet – who’s Baye’s real-life daughter – gives solid support. The revelation here is Bry. This is her debut, and she holds her own with the other two actresses. She conveys hesitancy and a need to belong but also a quiet determination and shows she’s not to be underestimated.
In the Limousin region, cinematographer Caroline Champetier has fashioned people and nature into poetry with her lens. The screen is awash in mostly blues and greys with splashes of buttercup, green and brown. The use of muted colours harkens back to a simpler era. We observe the women first using old-fashioned methods of ploughing, sowing and cutting wheat with sickle and scythe. More long shots of Hortense driving a cart and a line of workers after the harvest walking past crop stacks are as if paintings of Corot and Millet have come to life.
Hortense and Solange usher in modernization with purchases of a new combine harvester and a riding tractor as the guardians of the farm – the caretakers – though the implication is that the men will come home and take control again. Even though society changed after the Great War, it would take another world war for women to make further progress in equality but not even then were they emancipated fully. This understatedly strong movie gives us the resilient wives, mothers, and daughters who kept the home fires burning, and is worth seeking out.
words Rhonda Lee Reali