The Guardians [Les gardiennes] **** (2017, Nathalie Baye, Iris Bry, Laura Smet, Cyril Descours) – Movie Review 

Co-writer/ director Xavier Beauvois’s World War One French countryside epic offers Nathalie Baye a great role as the matriarch of a family farm, where the young menfolk are sent to fight the Germans and the women take on 20-year-old orphan Francine (Iris Bry) to help out.

Life is hard on the farm, but Francine proves a gem for the family, a hard, conscientious, humble little worker. But there is always the worry of the menfolk being killed, wounded or captured, and things get complicated when Francine and family son Georges (Cyril Descours) fall for each other. And they get more complicated still when a bunch of Americans arrive in the area.

There is plenty of plot in the screenplay by Beauvois and Frédérique Moreau, based on a story by Ernest Pérochon. But The Guardians is not about plot and story. It is entirely about characters, mood, atmosphere and ideas. How very French, of course, you may say.

Be prepared for extended sequences of antique cutting, bundling and sowing corn, against beautifully photographed backdrops. Take it as it comes at its steady pace, and you will be richly rewarded. For this is a fine film, harking back to similar-seeming French countryside epics of the Thirties and Nineties. It is in a great tradition, and it treads firmly and securely in that.

There is just a slight hint of element of comment on that perhaps. It seems to step back and show you it is commenting on the genre. This may or may not be intentional, but that is the impression the film gives.

Nathalie Baye smiling!

An almost unrecognisable Nathalie Baye, now with more than 100 film credits, is magnificent as the matriarch Hortense. It is a great role for an older actress. Others could have done it – Catherine Deneuve of course springs to mind. But Baye owns it. Baye’s Hortense is incredibly steely. She is the essence of grim determination, an unkind of Mother Courage. She never once smiles, though a slight hint of one passes across her determined face a couple of times in the film’s 138 minutes.

She has to be strong for everybody. But she is also wrong-headed, possibly even a monster, as she later stands accused. She is quite frightening.

[Spoiler alert] She has a chance to redeem herself, pauses for thought, and doesn’t take it. She has her reasons, but she is the monster mother, monstrously defended and defending. I told you it is a great role.

Young Iris Bry is nearly as good in a much less showy role as the young and isolated Francine, who works so desperately hard in her quiet, almost saintly way to fit in, redeem her life and become one of her new-found family. I imagine we all know where that idea is headed.

The film has a Dickens look and feel to it, but if it was Dickens it would be way gloomier, though honestly it is quite gloomy enough. Beauvois seems to be agreeing that life in nasty, brutish and short, especially down on the farm in wartime. There is not much chance of a disagreement there then, I guess.

[Spoiler alert] There is a slight hint of a happy ending, you will be pleased to hear, something it has in common with several other films at the 2017 London Film Festival. This captures our zeitgeist. Times are hard, but, maybe, just maybe, there is a little light at the end of the tunnel if we look hard enough. By the way, if the women are The Guardians while the men are away at war, what are they actually guardian?

It is one of the nominees for Best Film at the 2017 London Film Festival.

Beauvois is the director of Of Gods and Men [Des hommes et des dieux] (2010).

Baye also appears in Day for Night, The Mouth Agape, The Man Who Loved Women, The Green Room, The Return of Martin Guerre and It’s Only the End of the World.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review 

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com