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
