Xavier Beauvois's film 'The Guardians' tells the story of a rural French family left behind during the First World War while the young menfolk are off fighting at the front. It's a quiet and observational movie, watching the rhythms of the agricultural calendar while human life is in some senses on hold. Unfortunately, the conceit is rather overdone: in six years, we see almost no signs of joy or even simple boisterousness, as if the war shifted everyone into a permanent state of dignified melancholy. The result is a overly slow and solemn story.

The French movie Les Gardiennes (2017) was shown in the U.S. with the translated title The Guardians. It was co-written and directed by Xavier Beauvois . It stars Iris Bry as Francine, an orphan who works at a family farm while the men are at the front in WWI. Nathalie Baye portrays Hortense, a farm matriarch with two sons and a son-in-law away at war. Laura Smet plays Solange, Hortense's daughter. (She actually is Baye's daughter.)

This movie is brilliant in its portrayal of the hard physical labor demanded of farmworkers--male or female--a century ago. Their men suffered terribly in the trenches, but keeping the farm going wasn't a bed of roses.

One interesting theme of the film is that the war demanded machines of war. Some of these machines had civilian utility. When the war begins, horses and oxen pulled the plow. By the end of the war, a tractor would replace them.

The acting in the movie was superb throughout. However, in my opinion, acting honors go to Natalie Baye. Baye was almost 70 when she played this role. When she was young, she was the darling of the French New Wave directors. Her acting skills are obviously intact, and she carries off her role superbly.

We saw this movie at Rochester's excellent Little Theatre. It will work almost as well on the small screen. This movie has an adequate 7.1 IMDb rating. but I think it's much better than that. Don't miss it!

Xavier Beauvois back in the 1990's made a very good film ' N'oublie pas que tu vas Mourir '. I saw it at a Florence film festival and was impressed especially as it approached the subject of AIDS from a heterosexual perspective. AIDs, drugs in Amsterdam and the former Yugoslavian civil wars was quite a combination, and for me it worked. It was stark and not made as a crowd pleaser and I admired him for it. I have lost track of his work since then, but after being on the shelf for a while I watched ' Les Gardiennes '. At first I was impressed by the routine lives set in rural France during WW1 and how the women coped with their lives, fathers and sons fighting. But as the film progressed I got bored with the prettiness of the photography and also the music which was bland given the subject matter. The central point of interest was the predicament of the character played very well by Iris Bry, and her unfair endurance at the hands of a so called ' normal ' family. Keeping the family together at all brutal costs is not in my code of existence, and Nathalie Baye ( excellent as always ) as the mother turned from understandable grief at the loss of a son to a moral monster. The young woman's predicament was distantly related to Thomas Hardy's ' Tess of the D'Urbervilles ' and her resilience similar, although fortunately she does not end up on the gallows. All the same the complicit togetherness of the family structure fortified by the mother repelled me, and the last scene of the film with its perfunctory open ended optimism stretched endurance to its limit. Overall the film seemed swamped by its ' beauty ' and no doubt many have liked that approach. The brief and truthfully shown war scene where all men on either side are seen as equals in the needlessly cruel hands of those who caused it was excellently portrayed. The pity of war was apparent. The pitiless huddling together of the remaining ' family ' was not. A 6 for the portrayal of the cyclic seasons and the long painful years which is rarely done in the cinema, and with less picture postcard photography and a less barbaric family I could have given it a 10.