Mark Reviews Movies: THE GUARDIANS

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 24, 2018

While the men are fighting, the women are working. That's the basic summary of the first act or so of The Guardians, co-writer/director Xavier Beauvois' adaptation of Ernest Pérochon's 1924 novel. It's a story of the Great War on the home front, in which a group of women must tend to the fields and keep up life at home, while maintaining a strong face against the daily flood of bad news from the frontlines.

For a while, this is a straightforward and mostly uneventful narrative, yet that study of unity—within mundane routines and a constant aura of dread for what seems to be inevitable—turns out to be more involving than the story's later and relatively abundant turns toward melodrama. Considering the era in which the original story was published, the shift is almost to be expected. It was a time shortly after the war, when the world was processing the validity of its causes and the horror of its consequences. Pérochon's work could be viewed as quite daring, and the only way for such a risky venture for reach any kind of mass appeal would be to form its story around a type of storytelling that would make the narrative more tenable.

Times, of course, have changed. The view of that complex war has, ironically, grown simpler. Watching the movie version of the novel is like observing a time capsule, both in the way that Beauvois so accurately captures the overall atmosphere of the period—its look, its rhythm, its mood—and in the way that the story seems more concerned with raising points than with creating actual characters.

The challenges here are to the notion of a worldwide war for reasons that no one seems to comprehend, to the ways in which that war was fought, and to the concept of the nobility of a certain class of landowner. In 1924, such ideas must have been fairly revolutionary.

In our current day and age, they, as well as the story that's being told to bring forth those themes, feel quaint. Hence, the movie feels like a faithful representation of the source material, the age from which it came, and the time that it's recreating. The central question is whether or not this story still holds the potential impact that it might have possessed some 90 years ago.

It begins with a small family, which has grown considerably smaller since the beginning of the war, on a farm on the French countryside in 1915. Hortense Sandrail (Nathalie Baye) is the matriarch of the family—a widow with three children. Her two sons, Georges (Cyril Descours) and Constant (Nicolas Giraud), are at the front. They return separately for briefs stays while on leave, but the farewells become more immediate as the war continues.

On the farm are her daughter Solange (Laura Smet, who's Baye's real-life daughter, too), whose older husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin) is also a soldier, and Hortense's brother Henri (Gilbert Bonneau). Henri is too old and frail to do any work on the farm, leaving the mother and daughter to do all of the seeding, plowing, milking, and other tasks. When the time to harvest comes around, the remaining locals, mostly women and children (with a few soldiers on leave or men who are too old to fight joining them), gather together in solidarity and, really, for survival.

The main focus of the story arrives with Francine (Iris Bry), an orphaned young woman who's sent to the farm for temporary employment. As time passes, Francine holds her own, becomes a vital fixture of the farm, and starts to believe that she has become part of the family.

There isn't much of a plot for a while, but for a large portion of the early parts of the movie, the screenplay by Beauvois, Marie-Julie Maille, and Frédérique Moreau is more concerned with the details of daily life on the farm and the assorted challenges of that life in wartime. As such, Beauvois and cinematographer Caroline Champetier give us lengthy and distant shots of the women's toil against idyllic, untouched-by-combat landscapes. There's a genuine sense of labor, heightened by the constant reminders of the emotional toil being taken upon by these characters (Weekly church services include a list of those killed in combat, and the camera passes over the faces of women in mourning and children who know what's happening but can't quite comprehend it).

Almost inevitably, the skeleton of a plot forms. Francine falls in love with Georges—a pairing of which Hortense does not approve. Rumors begin to swirl about the attention Solange pays to American soldiers awaiting orders. After showing us the strength and resolve of these women, the sudden change to clichéd matters of the heart feels off. What can be said of the rather predictable turns of the story is that it forces us to question the assumed nobility of certain characters, as the conflict becomes more about class than anything else.

The story's ultimate point is much deeper than its surface, suggesting that the unquestioned bonds of family are of a piece with the politics that caused the war. The eventual focus of The Guardians on melodramatic turns, though, lessens that point and, indeed, the potential for a sincere, thoughtful study of a war's impact on those left behind.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray