Film review

  • The Guardians

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les gardiennes

    Xavier Beauvois (2017)

    The title characters are women left in charge of a farm – the widowed matriarch Hortense Sandrail (Nathalie Baye), her daughter Solange (Laura Smet, who is also Baye’s daughter) and, a little way into the story, Francine (Iris Bry), a peasant girl they take on as a labourer.  Their menfolk – Hortense’s sons Constant (Nicholas Giraud) and Georges (Cyril Descours), Solange’s considerably older husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin) – are soldiers in the Great War.  Each of the men returns at least once for a brief period of leave but the only continuous male presence on the farm is the elderly Henri (Gilbert Bonneau), Hortense’s father-in-law.   The Guardians is lengthy and, for most of its 138 minutes, moves slowly – qualities that Xavier Beauvois sees as essential to the time and place in which his film, based on a 1924 novel by Ernest Pérochon, is set.  (Beavois wrote the screenplay with Frédérique Moreau and Marie-Julie Maille, who is also the editor and a member of the cast.)  The slow pace and paucity of dramatic events serve to convey the characters’ feeling that the war will never end, that change is most likely to come in the form of bad news about one of their loved ones – as it duly does, when Clovis is taken prisoner and Constant killed in action.

    Caroline Champetier’s cinematography is a major strength, as it was in Beauvois’s best-known work, Of Gods and Men (2010).  As in that film, the serene beauty of the landscape contrasts with an equally present climate of violence, with the difference that in The Guardians the two are geographically separate and the violence is rarely visible.  The closest that warfare comes to physical intrusion on the farm is Georges’ nightmare of the trenches:  he wakes screaming and, in the process, his mother in the room next door.  Cornfields, woods and skies repeatedly evoke the rural France of art history.  The visuals are beautifully composed – occasionally too composed.  Francine stops to look at wares displayed outside a local shop:  the blues and greys of the objects on sale are so delicately graded that the tonality quite dominates the moment.  For the most part, though, the images are more than aesthetically pleasing.  Champetier lights the faces of the main characters in close-up to consistently eloquent effect.  When the camera moves across the faces of a funeral congregation most of whom we see only this once, each face is singular and naturally expressive.

    Beauvois sometimes gives scenes of mourning a striking sensory quality.  Shortly after hearing of Constant’s death, Hortense is tearfully milking her cows; one of their tails keeps flicking in her face.  Monette (Marie-Julie Maille), another local woman whom Francine works for after parting company with the Sandrails, is baking when she learns that her husband has been killed.  Her right hand, covered in the dough she’s kneading, is held as if in suspended animation; the man who’s come to break the news to Monette gently takes her hand to remove the dough sticking to it.  Beauvois has a talent for transcending cliché by committing wholeheartedly to his directorial choices.  The ‘last supper’ episode in Of Gods and Men is an extended example of this.  The same thing happens more briefly in The Guardians when Henri sits alone, wringing his hands in grief at his grandson’s death.  This goes on so long and Gilbert Bonneau gives it such intensity that the wrung hands seem to take on a life of their own.  They’re compelling to a degree you just don’t expect when the sequence starts.  Of Gods and Men ends with an extended shot of the doomed monks gradually disappearing into whiteness as they’re marched up a snowy hill.  Caroline Champetier creates a similar ‘moment in and out of time’, as Hortense watches the figure of Constant, departing the farm when his furlough is over, recede into a blue-green distance from which it’s clear he’ll never re-emerge.

    Beauvois constructs a detailed and convincing portrait of the local community.  There’s another good, early scene involving Constant, who is a teacher at the village school rather than a farmer.  Visting the school while on leave, he listens with weary politeness rather than enthusiasm to a rousing anti-Boche chorus from the children he once taught.  As with many films that build up interest by creating a quasi-documentary reality, The Guardians struggles to negotiate a transition to more standard dramatic territory.  The love affair between Georges and Francine, including the jealous reaction to it of Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux-Ely), Clovis’s daughter from an earlier marriage, has developed plausibly (though, for this viewer, too slowly).  The advent of a group of cocky, randy American soldiers billeted in the locality marks a change of pace and an injection of more obvious characterisation.  It also presages a switch to coincidence and contrivance.

    As Hortense and Georges are heading back to the railway station, at the end of his leave, they catch sight of one of the Americans embracing Francine.  His attentions are unwanted by her but instantly and decisively misinterpreted by Georges, who tells Hortense to get rid of Francine.  What follows makes sense only as a melodramatic dictate.  After being dismissed by Hortense, who doesn’t mention that this is at Georges’s insistence, Francine is taken on by Monette and soon discovers that she’s carrying Georges’s baby.  She continues to send letters to him at the front but gets no reply.  Francine must conclude from Georges’s silence either that he’s dead or that Hortense has been telling him lies about her.  Either would compel Francine to renew contact with Hortense but this is artificially delayed.  When Francine eventually writes to Hortense with the news that she’s carrying Georges’s baby, Beauvois resorts to the old letter-in-the-fire routine.  (It’s easier to keep a secret a secret in pre-central heating period drama.  Nowadays, characters always consign a crucial missive to the waste bin, where it’s bound to be discovered.)

    Beauvois indicates time passing by illustrations of the changing seasons and indicating a new year date on the screen – 1914 to 1920 inclusive.  For much of the film, these devices work well as means of underlining the long continuation of the war and reflecting the disciplined patience of both the principal characters and the director.  Once The Guardians is into more conventional mode, the date indicator means less;  after the end of hostilities, it draws attention to how the film, rather than the war, is dragging on.  The possibilities for modernising the farming operation, centred on acquiring a tractor, have been an effective thread throughout.  In one of the better moments late on, an argument over land between Clovis and Georges, both safely returned from the War, dismays Solange but almost reassures Hortense that things are getting back to normal.  By now, though, The Guardians is more preoccupied with what happens to Francine.

    Focusing increasingly on one young woman’s struggle against the odds, Xavier Beauvois seems to lose interest in the more distinctive story he’d been telling about the struggles of three different women.  It’s not a problem to the extent that, in a strong cast, the newcomer Iris Bry stands out, thanks largely to the beauty of her face and her singing.  Francine sings in the Sandrails’ farmyard and to Monette’s child:  these bits aren’t dramatically significant but stay in the mind because Bry’s voice is so tunefully pure.  In the closing scene, Francine, now a single mother who needs to make a living, is a chanteuse in a bar.  The melody and performance are lovely but the gently regretful lessons-I’ve-learned-from-life lyric of Francine’s song comes across as the summing up of a drama more familiar than, and very different from, what The Guardians for so long seemed to be – and seemed to want to be.

    21 August 2018

  • The French Lieutenant’s Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Karel Reisz  (1981)

    ‘I’ve not seen this since when it first came out,’ said my nearest neighbour, as we waited in NFT2 beforehand.  ‘Same here,’ I replied.  I didn’t tell him that just about all I could remember about The French Lieutenant’s Woman was seeing it on the evening of Charles and Diana’s wedding day.  My recall of similar pairings is effortlessly intact:  Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in the morning, Last Tango in Paris the same afternoon; William and Kate followed by The Browning Version.  The former is understandable:  it was November 1973, a few weeks before I was officially old enough to see an X film.  The 2011 souvenir is merely irritating since I didn’t even watch the wedding.  Although I often wish my memory were better at retaining more valuable things, a second viewing of Karel Reisz’s film left me doubtful if it’s worth keeping in mind.

    Post-modern fiction puts a particular slant on the never-ending debate over whether a film based on a novel should be judged with or without reference to its source.  If the adapter is ‘faithful’ to a post-modern text, what is he or she being chiefly faithful to – the plot and characters, the underlying themes or the novelist’s use of techniques such as deconstruction and unreliable narrators?   In order to appreciate the screen adaptation of a piece of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman has been described), is it more important for the audience to be familiar with the original work than it was for viewers of, say, David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist?  If the answer to that question is yes, it may partly explain why I was bored by Reisz’s film of a book I haven’t read.  I can see from The French Lieutenant’s Woman that, for example, the title character Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) appears to have stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting; that, as a gentleman palaeontologist, the male protagonist Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) is also something of a Victorian archetype.  Smithson’s forename reinforces this idea; the forename and Cockney accent of his servant Sam Farrow (Hilton McRae) bring to mind another nineteenth-century literary serving man, Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers.  Yet seeing that last connection falls well short of understanding that, according to one scholarly article on Fowles’s text[1], ‘the tension between Sam [Farrow] and Charles Smithson importantly demonstrates Marxist class struggle’.  It’s hard for a newcomer to the material to watch the movie and infer much of Fowles’s commentary on Victorian life, art and politics.

    When The French Lieutenant’s Woman, after several false starts involving other writers and directors, reached the screen in 1981, the production budget was $8m (somewhere in the region of $40m today).  Although, at that cost, the people who made the film could hardly be cavalier about its commerciality, the novel had, within a decade or so of its publication in 1969, sold many copies.  (I’m not sure at what point it became the ‘bestseller’ Wikipedia now describes it as.)   I’d guess that Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay, assumed that a fair proportion of the putative audience would already know the book, though I admit my guess is based largely on how little Reisz and Pinter seem to do to help the uninitiated.  That’s not, however, what the movie’s first sequence predicts.  We see a film crew preparing to shoot a scene; a voice off-screen asks the cloaked, hooded figure of a woman, ‘Ready, Anna?’ and the figure nods her head.  We can just about see Meryl Streep’s face inside the hood and recognise the costume as the one she’s wearing on the poster for Reisz’s film.  In other words, we realise instantly that Streep isn’t simply playing the main part in The French Lieutenant’s Woman:  she’s playing an actress playing the main part in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

    This immediate and apt reflection of Fowles’s book’s awareness of its contrivances introduces a bifurcated narrative, comprising the Victorian-era story of Charles Smithson’s obsession with the mysterious Sarah Woodruff and the extra-marital affair between Anna and Mike (Jeremy Irons again) – the two actors playing Sarah and Smithson in the film being made within the film before our eyes.   As this latter part of the narrative proceeds, it’s exposed as something less smart than the device revealed in the opening sequence.  Its main purpose is obvious from the moment when, at a social gathering, Anna’s husband Davide (Gérard Falconetti) asks Mike how the film will end since the book has two endings – one happy, one unhappy.  The two stories told by  Reisz and Pinter are linked only by the fact that, in each of them, the man played by Jeremy Irons is increasingly frustrated by the elusiveness of the woman played by Meryl Streep.  Charles Smithson’s eventual rediscovery of Sarah Woodruff allows for a very low-key happy ending to the nineteenth-century aspect; Anna’s swift departure from a wrap party allows a more decisively unhappy ending to the modern-day one.  Mike, left standing at a window as her car drives off, calls her name – except that he calls ‘Sarah’.  As well as being banal, this moment seems a cheat:  up to this point, Pinter has (rightly) disdained the cliché of actors becoming caught up in the characters they’re currently involved with.  There’s been no suggestion hitherto that Mike is obsessed less by Anna than by the woman she’s playing.

    The recreation of Victorian Lyme Regis and Freddie Francis’s varied lighting are impressive.  So is Meryl Streep – up to a point.  A couple of years ago on The Graham Norton Show, pressed to name a film in which she felt disappointed by her work, Streep chose The French Lieutenant’s Woman because she ‘didn’t feel the character’.  That’s certainly the impression you get from watching her as Sarah Woodruff.  Her meticulous, mannered interpretation could be justified as analogous to the self-aware artifice of the novel yet it’s hard to accept on those terms when another unsatisfying, nearly contemporary Streep performance, in Still of the Night (1982), was conspicuous for  just the same qualities.  Her playing of Sarah sowed the seeds of critical and public perceptions of Streep as ‘cold’ and ‘technical’.  This was also her first ‘accent’ role in cinema (though not her first on screen:  that came in the 1978 TV mini-series Holocaust.)  Watching Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman today, what’s most striking is that, despite the severe limitations of the Anna-Mike thread, she’s more compelling as the egotistical American actress than she is as the singular proto-feminist Sarah Woodruff.  (The implication of Fowles’s title that this woman belongs to a man is no doubt intentionally misleading.)  Streep is splendid in a tense exchange of small talk between Anna and Mike’s wife Sonia (expertly played by Penelope Wilton).  This conversation injects a shot of ‘good’ Pinter into the twentieth-century story, most of which is so tamely conventional it hardly feels like Pinter at all.

    Jeremy Irons broke through in 1981 thanks to the combination of this film and playing Charles Ryder in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.  He’s very proficient as this other Charles and as Mike, though (in retrospect anyway) unsurprising in both roles.  Lynsey Baxter does well as Smithson’s entitled but vulnerable fiancée Ernestina.   A strong collection of older British character actors fill the smaller parts – Alun Armstrong, John Barrett, Patience Collier, Richard Griffiths, Colin Jeavons, Leo McKern, Charlotte Mitchell, Liz Smith, Peter Vaughan and Doreen Mantle (Mrs Warboys in One Foot in the Grave), who appears fleetingly as a train passenger.   One of the few light-hearted pleasures of the film is seeing some of these people –also, of course, the cast of the ‘interior’ version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman – released from period costume into casual modern clothes at a lunch chez Mike and Sonia and the concluding wrap party.

    20 August 2018

    [1]  Landrum, David W, ‘Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ (Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1996)

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