LIFE GOES ON

Mostwarfilmstakethe role of women for granted. (Most wars, too.) Back on the home front, they worry and cook and make do.

Les Gardiennes (The Guardians), from French director Xavier Beauvois, aims to correct that misperception. Set somewhere in France during the First World War, it opens with a scene of battlefield carnage, but mostly takes place on a small farm, far from the fighting.

Hortense (Nathalie Baye) has two sons in the war, but she still has to run the family farm, which remains medieval in lack of mechanization. The government sends her a farmhand, 20-year-old Francine (riveting newcomer Iris Bry), who quickly proves herself useful. “As good as any man,” Hortense marvels.

The menfolk are occasionally home on leave, notable withdrawn and mostly silent about life at the front. Georges (Cyril Descours) takes a shine to Francine, and they start writing to each other, but misunderstandings and mistrust create friction, particularly from Marguerite, who has known Georges since childhood and expects to marry him.

That’s the romantic plot of Les Gardiennes, sometimes backed by an intrusive, tootreacly score. But Beauvois, working from a 1924 novel by Ernest Pérochon and joined in screenwriting duties by Marie-julie Maille and Frédérique Moreau, spends as much time — and far more cinematography — on the business of running a farm.

Far from a pastoral idyll, these women (and male help when they can get it) struggle to keep things going. The timeline stretches over the entirety of the four-year conflict, so we get scenes in all seasons — of plowing, sowing, reaping, threshing, milking, etc. It’s beautiful to behold on the screen, but clearly tedious, repetitive and difficult work.

Beauvois also made the sublime 2010 drama Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux), based on the true story of a group of Trappist monks kidnapped by Islamic militants in 1996 Algeria. That film wore its humanism on its sleeve; in this one, the futility of war is nicely understated. In the scene where schoolchildren recite a racist poem about “the Boche,” Georges takes it in silently; later, another soldier mentions in passing that the Germans are just merchants and farmers, like the French.

The slow pace of The Guardians is perfect to allow such notions to settle slowly; this might be the least violent movie ever made about the First World War, its only real misstep an unrealistic nightmare flashback by Georges to his stint in the trenches. We are reminded that even in times of conflict, life goes on. ∂∂∂∂ Les Gardiennes opens June 15 in Calgary, and June 22 in Ottawa, Victoria and London.