Francine and the Guardians of the Gauloises

REVIEWS

Starring Nathalie Baye. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

The protectors of the title here are 2

not French soldiers on the frontlines of the First World War, but the women left behind to run the farms and businesses as increasingly pointless trench fighting drags on. That’s the focus of The Guardians, a beautifully wrought, if vexingly inconsistent, depiction of faraway lives and times.

Adapting Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 novel with two other writers, director Xavier Beauvois initially homes in on a mother and daughter struggling to keep up with the family farm. Stern Hortense and frustrated Solange Sandrail are played by a grey-wigged Nathalie Baye and Laura Smet, her real-life offspring with Johnny Hallyday. (Coincidentally, the Gallic rocker died the day this was released in France.)

The movie’s true centre, though, is the emblematically named female farmhand they’re forced to hire when the work piles up. Twenty-year-old orphan Francine (Iris Bry, in a striking screen debut) labours hard, keeps to herself, and is gradually accepted as part of the only family she’s ever known. But that changes, first for the better and then for far worse, when Hortense’s youngest son, Georges (Cyril Descours), home on leave, takes an active interest in this sturdy peasant with the flame-red hair and milk-white skin.

The movie veers into melodrama after this happens, and at two-anda-quarter hours—covering the years 1915 to 1920—it spends too much time on repetitive reaction shots and languorous close-ups to convey otherwise suppressed emotions. This leisurely approach works best at capturing the different sense of time experienced by rural and deeply prejudiced folk a century ago; in fact, the story is most compelling when dwelling on small details of farm life—how charcoal and butter are made, and the genuine excitement of getting one’s first tractor (a Fordson).

Elsewhere, the director (who also plays Juliette Binoche’s antagonist in Let the Sunshine In) makes a number of errors, the most egregious of which has the traumatized Georges dreaming of a slow-motion battle with German soldiers, culminating with one removing a gas mask to reveal… his own face! This film-noir cliché is jarring in a home-front tale otherwise delivered with naturalistic grace. And when the Yanks show up, in 1917, they are cartoon doughboys, not real characters.

Still, these missteps don’t mitigate the movie’s other potent virtues. In this sense, its real star is veteran cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who also shot Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men, as well as the phantasmagorical Holy Motors. Her widescreen depiction of shifting seasons and moods on an unchanging landscape tells you everything you need to know about what’s worth defending.

HEREDITARY

2> KEN EISNER

Starring Toni Collette. Rated 14A Hereditary has been generating a lot of buzz lately as the scariest horror flick in years, and I gotta admit that it’s pretty damn frightening in spots. It’s also brutally unsettling throughout, so be warned.

The movie opens with a shot of a typewritten obituary, and the fact that it doesn’t include one positive word about the deceased in its three paragraphs sets the tone for writer-director Ali Aster’s punishing portrait of grief, psychological trauma, and Satanism.

Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense) stars as Annie Graham, a diorama artist working on a project for an upcoming big-city gallery exhibit. Thanks to the exquisite camerawork of cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, we are taken right inside the meticulously crafted rooms of the miniature homes Annie builds—faithful re-creations of the ones in her own house, a beautiful wooden mansion in a forest. (The film was shot in Utah.) She’s joined in a mostly joyless existence there by dour husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), typical teenage son Peter (My Friend Dahmer’s Alex Wolff), and odd 13-year-old daughter Charlie (enigmatic newcomer Milly Shapiro).

At the funeral for her mother— the subject of the terse obit—annie reads a harsh eulogy that portrays the matriarch as secretive, eccentric, and anything but the ideal mom. Soon after the dead woman’s grave is desecrated, a tragic and shocking car accident cloaks the family in despair. The Grahams seemed pretty messed up to begin with, but the recent events take things to a whole new level of anguish.

In obvious need of help, Annie is befriended by Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman from the grief-support group she occasionally attends, who raves about the therapeutic benefits of holding a séance to communicate with lost loved ones. But Annie’s guilt-driven attempt to contact the other side only proves that you should never, ever mess with the occult.

With so much real-life emotional torment going on, by the time Hereditary’s supernatural set pieces arrive you’ve already been horrified to the max. The wrath of Satan seems pretty tame compared to the suffering that damaged family members can inflict on one another.

> STEVE NEWTON

Any cast that dares to mix the mighty Foster with Dave Bautista as a no-shit orderly and Jeff Goldblum as a gang boss named the Wolf King should have potential. Add in Sofia Boutella as a red-gowned, martialarts-master assassin and Charlie Day as an insecure, half-crazed arms dealer and you should be well on your way to fun, retrofuturistic excess.

But for all its deco-dystopian flair and cartoon-scale characters, Hotel Artemis lacks one key ingredient: momentum. In a brief setup outside the hotel, Sterling K. Brown’s bank robber ends up stealing a priceless item that belongs to the ruthless Wolf King. That’s meant to set off ample terror when they’re trapped together in the building. And, admittedly, it leads to one ingenious bit of nasty business, in which the 3-D printer turns into a weapon. But the bulk of the tension seems to stem from whether the Nurse will be able to keep a lid on her unruly patients.

So come for the outrageous setup, come for the eye candy, and come for Foster’s thoroughly nontraditional heroine. Just don’t expect to be glued to your seat for the wild ride the trailers are promising. Unless you have a serious thing for art-deco fixtures.

> JANET SMITH

day, but Diaz was later pushed out when Basquiat claimed the project as his own. This was the first of numerous bus-throwing incidents, although the various girlfriends, gallerists, and musical partners captured on-screen have long since forgiven the charmingly opportunistic wraith—even if his tendency to blast Einstürzende Neubauten at 3 a.m. still rankles a bit.

Our shaggy-haired antihero eventually attached himself to godhead Andy Warhol and took off like a heroin-fuelled rock star before hitting the 27 Club, in 1988. But Boom (again based on something Basquiat liked to say) really just uses him as ghostly tour guide of the hothouse environment that gave rise to the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. The main subject seems almost an afterthought at times. But as one of these heads puts it, “He liked to put his asterisk on everything!”

> KEN EISNER

The Guardians.