Tragedy on the French home front
The Guardians
15 cert, 135 min
Dir Xavier Beauvois Starring Iris Bry, Nathalie Baye, Laura Smet, Cyril Descours, Olivier Rabourdin, Nicolas Giraud
The story of France’s land girls during the First World War is told with patience and painterly finesse in this softly virtuosic period drama from Xavier Beauvois (Of Gods and Men), based on a 1924 novel by Ernest Pérochon. The place is the pastoral folds and plains of the Limousin in the Massif Central, the year 1915, the mood tense but perseverant.
The region’s menfolk are gone, swallowed up by the front some 400 miles to the north-east. So it falls to the women to till the soil and gather the crops – women like 20-year-old orphan Francine (screen newcomer Iris Bry), who arrives at the door of stoic, pewter-haired farmer’s widow Hortense (Nathalie Baye) on a 12-month contract, ready to do her bit.
The war itself is rarely glimpsed, but always invisibly present, through both the landscape’s eerie half-emptiness and the water-torture drip of death notices announced in church, as Beauvois’s camera watches the faces of the mourners.
When Hortense’s son Georges (Cyril Descours) comes home on leave, a new seam of sexual tension is struck through the daily routine: Georges is at least informally betrothed to young Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux), but he and Francine strike up a close relationship, and the two correspond by letter when he returns to active duties.
Hortense’s daughter Solange (played by Baye’s real daughter, Laura Smet) is already married, but her husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin) has been embittered by the conflict – a far cry from the handsome American GIS now roving around the landscape.
Beauvois’s vision of the period is totally convincing, and his depiction of hardscrabble farm life rings with a quiet vibrancy – a slow-burn story of tragedy and betrayal takes shape, but some of the best moments here are when the film just watches Hortense, Francine and Solange go about their work, and scenes in which charcoal is made in a mossy forest kiln and pats of golden butter are slapped into shape in the pantry look like magical rites.
Period detail feels truthful thanks to its particular way of looking: cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s compositions look like canvasses by Daubigny, Corot and Millet, capturing the essence of a moment so vividly you can almost smell the morning mist.
This is a rich, fulfilling film that rolls along with the bittersweet turn of the seasons, and makes centuryold rhythms of living engrossing and fresh. RC