The Guardian
THE GUARDIANS, drama, rated R, in French with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3.5 chiles
Here’s a war movie with no war. The only scenes that bring the front up close are an opening pan of dead soldiers strewn on a battlefield, and later a PTSD nightmare that afflicts a young man home on leave.
The rest of the story (adapted from a 1924 novel by World War I veteran Ernest Pérochon) is told from the distaff side, the unseen suffering of a community deprived of its healthy young men. With the war raging near enough to be felt but not seen or heard, the grinding physical work of farming, as well as the household chores, fall to Madame Hortense (a grim Nathalie Baye) and her daughter Solange (Laura Smet, Baye’s real daughter). Director Xavier Beauvois follows them into the fields as they trudge behind a horse- drawn plow, wield a scythe, gather the wheat, scatter the seeds, slop the pigs, and milk the cows.
One at a time, their men return on leave. First is the oldest son Constant (Nicolas Giraud), the village schoolteacher, who convinces his mother that she needs to hire a hand to help with the harvest. Later we meet Solange’s husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin), who has begun to drink more heavily, and finally Georges (Cyril Descours), Hortense’s younger son.
By the time Georges arrives, Hortense has taken on some help in the form of a redheaded twenty-year-old orphan, Francine (Iris Bry), a strapping, good-natured beauty who works hard and uncomplainingly, and soon becomes a virtual member of the family.
It’s when it looks as if she might become an actual member of the family that things get awkward. There are sparks, and more, between Georges and Francine, which upsets the family’s plan for him to marry the teenage Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux-Ely), Clovis’ daughter from a former marriage.
It’s a small community. People help each other and know each other’s business, and one small complaint is that the screenplay can be arbitrary in selecting what things everybody knows, and what things some of the characters don’t. As stunningly shot by Caroline Champetier (who photographed this director’s award-winning Of Gods and Men), and beautifully acted by the three central women, life on the Paridier family farm in the war years is brutal, back-breaking work. But the setting in the rural French countryside is timeless and serene, and calls to mind a series of Millet paintings.
“After the war,” Constant muses during his brief furlough, “things will be different.” A more modern world is hovering around the corner. That is one of the themes that pervades this study of the suffering borne by people who had no hand in the war’s launching, and of their discovery of the strengths and weaknesses brought out by the imbalance war creates.