The Guardians (2017) User Reviews

Mother secures family farm in WW I but not without selfish ruin.

[maurice_yacowar · 8/10 · 25 June 2018]

The title is inadequately translated. The English "Guardians" is gender neutral. The French "Guardiennes" is explicitly feminine. That's the point. This film, a noble return to the classic French narrative style, exalts the role women played during WW I, not just running the family farm but in preserving the family unit, the larger social structure and civilized values. As the first two shots explain, the men are off dead and dying on the battlefield. Meanwhile, back on the farm, it's the matriarch Hortense pushing the plow behind the overworked mare. The rural beauty of France stands in implicit contrast to the violent destruction wreaked in the war. While the school kids learn a poem about the inhumanity of the Bosch (translation: Krauts), a returning soldier shares his contrary wisdom: the enemy German soldiers were just like their enemy French, simple ordinary folk thrown into a conflict neither of their making nor of their will or understanding. But the deaths and dread and nightmares roll on. The film's noblest soldier is Francine, the orphan girl Hortense hires to help in the harvest but who works her way into a permanent position with the family. That is, until their son Georges and she fall in love, threatening Hortense's control. For being a responsible, even heroic guardian is not enough. What's crucial is the values being guarded. Despite her affection and respect for Francine, Hortense lies about her virtue to dissuade son Georges from marrying her. She comes from nobody, she explains, with whoredom in her blood. Later Hortense refuses to tell Georges Francine is carrying his child. Thus Hortense meets what she sees her responsibility to maintain the family honour - letting Francine carry the guilt that daughter Solange has provoked - and to consign George to marry his drab childhood friend Marguerite. At this point the film's domestic point unfolds into the larger theme of French values, even European, indeed the entire Western Civilization that both World Wars ostensibly defended. Killing and dying for one's values may be a fine value - but that depends on the values. And whether the values defended in war are sustained in peacetime. The heroes' martial valour is undercut by Hortense's inhumanity both to her son and to his lover. She betrays her dutiful servant out of class snobbery, an exalted vanity and her need to keep control over her family. When she glimpses her unacknowledged grandchild, Hortense briefly realizes the horrible costs of her misdeed, even to herself. But she makes no amends. It's too late or her strength has left her too weak to undo the damage she did the son she thought she was protecting and the woman who served her so faithfully.. There's a sting in the tail at the end of the narrative. The eldest son back from the war, the farm thriving and modernized thanks to the women's initiative, the men fall to arguing over the division of the estate. The war briefly unified the men that can't live in peace at home. The only harmony and cheer are provided by the triumphant and resourceful Francine. Raising her child on her own, she's now also a locally successful singer, still brightening her world. Poor Georges in the audience is still enchanted by her and will never know his loss. He returned wounded from the war but emotionally crippled by his mother's betrayal. He won the continental war but lost the domestic battle.

Slow, supremely beautiful, well worth watching

[jon-seagrave · 8/10 · 14 October 2020]

A war film about the women left behind to struggle to work the land, with a classic tale of class, love and rejection, and final survival.

The film follows the rhythms of the farming year with the most gorgeous photography, lingering on details, faces, animals. I usually like films to have pace, but this one is most rewarding without that, and has strong emotional heft. The passion for the land runs deep both in rural areas, and French literature, and finds its cinematic expression here, notably at the end. The grief and anguish as telegrams come of death and capture Is finely portrayed.

Francine, the hard working orphan , well played, attracts our sympathy and support . If Hortense, the widowed farm owner, is a strong character, Francine is even more so, a survivor.

Ultimately unsatisfying

[jromanbaker · 6/10 · 8 November 2020]

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.

One of the most beautiful films in cinema and a best of the year.

[JohnDeSando · 30 May 2018]

"Two years of hell, some people went mad." "After the war, it will be different." Constant (Nicolas Girard)

The WWI soldier, Constant, in director Xavier Beauvois' The Guardians, captures the ambivalence of the "the war to end all wars": combat insanity that comes home with soldiers and the hopeless hope the world will be a better place. The only "better" is the film's depiction of strong women taking the reins of a farm, modernizing it and making a profit.

It's a small village whose story begins in 1915 and ends in 1920 in rural France, just long enough for women to take prominent places in the farms at home and for their returning men to find adjustment a challenge as they carry the memories of unspeakable horrors in the trenches of that "great war."

Hortense (Nathalie Bye), an aging owner of a working farm, rides the plow while she attends to the politics of the large farm without the crutch of a domineering male. She does well enough to engage the services of a young maid, Francine (Iris Bry), who is a change agent for Hortense and her soldier son and a signal of the complications war brings to the world.

The cinematography is a perfect reflection of the tranquil country side lost in a trance of bucolic tasks until the war's change agents arrive. Leave it to French cinema to languish over faces and landscapes, as if Manet or Constable were the artistic director. The slowly panning shots of laborers are as softly powerful as paintings in the camera's movement.

The Guardians is one of the most beautifully photographed and quietly told stories of women abiding the tyranny of war with an aplomb unseen in modern cinema. This minimalist epic is one of the year's best films and an appropriate emblem of the French ability to make cinema art. All other cinema pales by comparison.

Thin plot, little characterisation

[trish-fowlie · 6/10 · 7 March 2021]

Photography is beautiful and the actors do their best with a script which is anaemic in comparison with the novel on which the film is based. Many of the more interesting characters in the book are omitted, along with half of the setting - the people who live on the waterways. The ending is unbelievable.

Not Satisfied.

[symvscot · 6/10 · 17 March 2021]

I thought the film was mediocre. The ending definitely left me confused and wondering what happened with the rest of the film.

A work of compelling emotional force

[howard.schumann · 9/10 · 9 July 2018]

In his film "Of Gods and Men," director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of seven Roman Catholic French Trappist monks kidnapped by radical Islamists from their monastery in a village in Algeria during the Algerian Civil War, and the sacrifices that people of good will in both religions were willing to make. Sacrifice is also a theme of Beauvois latest film, The Guardians, his first film shot in digital. It is a superbly realized and emotionally engaging film that dramatizes the strength and courage of the women left behind during World War I when all able-bodied men were fighting in the trenches. A quiet, contemplative film, it is beautifully photographed by Caroline Champetier ("The Innocents") who captures the bucolic loveliness of the Limousin area of south central France.

Now part of the new region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, it is the least populated region of Metropolitan France and most likely has not changed much since the years in which the film takes place. Based on a 1924 novel by war veteran Ernest Pérochon, Beauvois and his co-writers Frédérique Moreau and Marie-Julie Maille gradually reveal the impact of the war on one family whose two sons and son-in-law have left for the front. Supported by a moving score by Michelle Legrand ("The Price of Fame"), the film covers a period of five years from 1915 to 1920, the years during and following the Great War in Europe, one that would claim an estimated 45 million military dead and wounded and 7.7 million missing or imprisoned.

The film opens in 1915 in a combat zone where we see the bodies of dead soldiers lying in the mud. The scene abruptly shifts to the Paridier farm in France, a place of quiet beauty that stands in sharp contrast to the heartbreak of the battlefield. It is a difficult time for the farm run by widowed matriarch Hortense Sandrail (Nathalie Baye, "Moka") with the help of her daughter Solange (Laura Smet, "Yves Saint-Laurent," Baye's real-life daughter) and her elderly father Henri (Gilbert Bonneau). Beauvois shows the heroism of the women furrowing, seeding, harvesting, grinding wheat, and taking it to market. It is backbreaking work and will be years before combines and tractors are introduced.

As the men periodically return home on leave, it becomes clear that each of them is damaged in some way. Hortense's oldest son Constant (Nicholas Giraud, "Anton Chekhov 1890"), a former schoolteacher, tells his mother that he endured, "two years of hell, some people went mad," and says without any evidence that "after the war, it will be different." Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin, "My Golden Days"), Solange's husband drinks heavily and stands up for the humanity of the Germans ("they are just like us") in opposition to the feelings of the family and the community. Finally, it is Hortense's son Georges (Cyril Descours, "Red Sky") who carries himself with a certain pride and even arrogance.

Frustrated by the need for another person to help her run the farm during the harvest season, Hortense hires Francine, a twenty-year-old auburn-haired orphan, remarkably performed by newcomer Iris Bly. In addition to the chores, Hortense must contend with some rowdy American soldiers stationed in the village awaiting their orders, while also looking after Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux), Clovis's daughter from his first marriage. Complications arise when Francine and George fall in love, much to the chagrin of the much younger Marguerite, assumed to be the girl that George would marry. The friction between members of the family forms the centerpiece of the film and Beauvois weaves a complex and unpredictable story without resorting to melodrama.

Unfortunately, when the town's rumor mill goes into high gear spreading all kinds of rumors, Francine's future is left on shaky ground. Even more disturbing is the sad news from the front delivered by a local official who just appears at the door. As events unfold, we are drawn closer to each character, able to relate to their hopes and sorrows as if we have known them all of their lives. Though The Guardians is a film of subtlety and restraint, it is also a work of compelling emotional force and one of the year's best films.

Slow but rewarding

[arsaellb · 7/10 · 3 August 2019]

Very slow start and little dialogue in periods. The second half is much better and the story is quite engaging in the end.

Beautiful, subtle film about women's day to day during First World War

[jabberwhack · 9/10 · 25 August 2018]

Xavier Beauvois just does the most beautiful films. As with Of Gods and Men, The Guardians is full of quiet dignity and humanity, and it gets the emotions just right. There are so many films about the battlefront, it's great to see one focussed on the scene back home and on women's work, their hopes, their endurance, their grief, and even their betrayals. The pace is slow, and follows the events of the narrative as much as the seasons and the labour they entail. Beauvois is someone who takes the time to show people who are not often seen on screen go about their everyday life, their toil. When do we get to see women shovelling dirt, feeding fodder to cattle, or doing the harvest? It's sometimes hard to believe this takes place between 1916-20 and the contrast with our post-post-modern world is all the more valuable. We're lucky that a director of such talent chooses topics like this for his work.

Lenta pero agradable. Slow but nice

[Andres-Camara · 6/10 · 18 November 2018]

Este es un director que no me llega a transmitir. Pero tengo que admitir que esta película, aun teniendo un tempo, lento, aun explayándose demasiado tiempo en cosas que no hacen falta, nos cuenta la vida del campo entera y no necesitamos saberla, pero la película tiene interés.

Me sobra el principio de la película. Los dos primero años. Se entiende perfectamente sin ellos.

Los actores están estupendos, si no fuese por ellos, la película se caería entera.

La iluminación no es mala, es peor, tiene una fotografía blanca que no me dice nada de nada.

El director, que no gusta como dirige, para mi guste hace una película larga. Vale que el tempo le guste lento, vale, a veces hace falta. Pero que sobren secuencias, es otra cosa. Es especialista en observar con la cámara y a mí eso me parece perder mucha potencia visual.

Pero esta al menos si tiene fuerza.

This is a director who does not transmit to me. But I have to admit that this film, even having a tempo, slow, even expounding too much time on things that are not needed, tells us the life of the whole field and we do not need to know it, but the film has interest.

I have plenty of the beginning of the movie. The first two years. It is perfectly understood without them.

The actors are great, if it were not for them, the film would fall entirely.

The lighting is not bad, it's worse, it has a white photograph that does not tell me anything at all.

The director, who does not like how he directs, for my liking makes a long film. It's okay if the tempo likes slow, okay, sometimes it's necessary. But what about sequences, is another thing. He is a specialist in observing with the camera and to me that seems to lose a lot of visual power.

But this is at least if it has strength

Slow and solemn

[paul2001sw-1 · 5/10 · 30 December 2021]

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.

Strong dramatic film about French Civilians in WWI

[Red-125 · 10/10 · 19 June 2018]

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!

Beautifull slow film of the French countryside in 1914-1918

[frankvaneijkern · 7/10 · 23 March 2018]

While the man are fighting the Germans, the women take care of the farm and land. Against this background the story enrolles.

Does anything happen?

[nsg666 · 3/10 · 30 October 2021]

25 minutes in and one woman had employed another woman to help with harvest then lots of women were cutting wheat. I've persevered with this type of slow film before but never been rewarded for doing so. On this occasion I switched it off.

Slow but beautiful

[richard-1787 · 8 January 2018]

This movie does not move quickly. But it is beautifully filmed and well acted by a group of actresses headed by Natalie Baye. Not for the impatient, but it will be appreciated by those who can take the time to let it have an effect.

This is life on the home front, in the country The other side of war. No one shot at these women, but their lives were still difficult.

Interesting that the depiction of American soldiers is largely negative. They have plenty of money, and are not interested in "the locals" other than as sex objects.

Satisfying

[elision10 · 7/10 · 17 February 2024]

I'm tired of some fellow IMDBers calling movies like this one "slow and boring." What do you want?' Car chases? Bombs? If you have no patience to let a story unfold, then don't watch movies like this. It's not spectacular, but it is highly effective and enjoyable. These are real people, with human goodness and human frailties. The story is not unusual, but it is well told. It's interesting to get an in-depth movie about the home front at war, and the way it brings forth new challenges and perhaps some benefits as well. WW1 at the home front for many was not as cataclysmic as WW2. Anyway, well worth watching -- if you don't insist on action in every frame.

France as you've never seen it and introducing Iris Bry

[pfscpublic · 9/10 · 25 August 2018]

I was smitten by Iris Bry as Francine and entranced by the film, thinking about French landscape from a different point of view in those war years. If you love film, sit back and enjoy a wonderful story that differs from the usual WW1fare.

Almost in a class by itself.

[Bachfeuer · 10/10 · 15 July 2018]

Few tho they are, the previous user reviews do well at putting this superb film in context--even while underrating it. I thought JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING were simply the best films made in the 80s. This film, with its related French provincial peasant saga, is very nearly as good. FRANTZ and A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT are very distinguished recent comparables. Enjoy!

About working!

[Complicated92 · 5/10 · 22 January 2021]

A movie about women who works a lot! And we see these village's works a lot too! And yes, we see a little story between these works! Not a good movie but OK!

Nontraditional Female World War I Characters

[Blue-Grotto · 9/10 · 2 December 2018]

Roles for women in First World War films are usually restricted to lovers left behind, grieving mothers or romantic trysts. Here the camera lingers on different female characters who fought a different kind of war.

Hortense and her daughter Solange are running a farm in the absence of male relatives. Desperate for a farmhand, Hortense reluctantly hires an orphan, Francine, who turns out to be perfect for the job. Amiable, responsible and a hard worker, everyone loves her. But they love her too much, for jealousy raises its ugly head. The family, out of fear that she might not love them as much as they love her, drives Francine away. Francine initially takes it in stride, as she habitually does, singing, writing, working, not giving up on love, and happy despite adversity. It is then that Francine discovers she is pregnant which could lead her back to the family farm, deeper in misfortune, or something beyond both.

The Guardians is a unique, unexpected and fascinating take on World War I. The feeling of just how good it is builds and near the ending it hit me like a sudden and strong wind. I loved watching and listening to Francine sing so happily, despite her pain. It gives meaning to Shakespeare's words; "when we for recompense have praised the vile, it stains the glory in that happy verse which aptly sings the good." The Guardians includes fantastic cinematography, wonderful wardrobes and stellar performances, especially by the leads. The front line of the war and the tragic sacrifice of soldiers there, looms in the background as one of the sub themes. Recently available on Netflix.

No "je ne sais quoi"

[Berlinerin2020 · 2/10 · 25 September 2020]

I found this movie so frustrating that I stopped and started watching it several times out of boredom. Finally, I made it to the end, and was relieved that the torture had ended.

This film is comprised of many long pans on faces, a love letter to French peasantry, and has little to no character development. There is also little plot development, action or even something resembling an in-depth storyline until the latter part of the film.

No "je ne sais quoi" pour moi.

Why French cinema is the best

[philipfoxe · 9/10 · 13 October 2020]

A prosaic story of the cost of war. Sparse dialogue. And yet it is the unspoken and inarticulate manner that gives it its intensity. We feel the shifting emotions as events proceed. Just as we settle to what we feel is predictable feel good, another grenade is lobbed into the room. Our feelings for the characters shift as their decisions reverberate. The only fly in the ointment for me was the continuity errors that saw contradictions in the timing of the farming season. Pretty sure you don't sow cereal crops at the same time as harvest!

Beautiful and subtle film making at its best.

[Steadico · 10/10 · 12 October 2020]

This is a beautiful film paced to follow the lives of the women of a french farming family as they struggle through the distant horror of world war one. It is set over some five years as the men of the family are sent to fight in the trenches and the survivors eventually return.

Les Guardiennes is a modern french masterpiece and not for the impatient viewer expecting the standard war film fare (noted dismally low scores from such viewers on IMDB)

Perfectly cast and wonderfully acted.

The changing seasons of the french countryside fills the expansive frame and is beautifully captured by DoP Caroline Champetier. When the camera moves, She gives it a graceful unhurried and unobtrusive motion that ebbs and flows perfectly with the action.

A must see movie for any aspiring filmmaker.

an other french NAVET

[sixgale · 1/10 · 14 April 2018]

Slow and boring dramatized and very uninteresting 14-18 french story

frankly do not loose your time and money you will be disappointed

Nathalie Baye are good where Laura Smet seem to be insane and crazy like mad dog

No music, flat story, uninteresting and without any interest you will see an american soldier (14-18!!!???) well a shame and this shame cote 7.3 on imdb ...

Spare Beauty

[screenwriter-972-149612 · 10/10 · 24 January 2021]

Nothing is wasted in this film. Not a scene. Not an action. Not a word of dialogue. So trimmed down that it could easily have been a silent movie with its few spoken moments relegated to title cards, this movie still manages to say all that is has to. And speaks beautifully. The cinematography is crisp when it has to be and soft when it's called for. And works perfectly. The golden hour shots are there, as one would expect. But broad daylight and early mornings are captured fully too. It's feast for the eyes. Nathalie Baye is the hub around which the various connected sub plots all spin and she's more than up for the task. In her brief stay in Hollywood no one appears to have known how to use her. In France they just put her in front of a camera and magic happens. The movie is, indeed, about guardians. Those left behind to guard life behind the front. Those who feel as though they must guard their family's name. And those who must guard against insult either real or imaginary. A story beautifully told that's certainly open for interpretation. Me? I found it strangely hopeful. But, of course, I stayed with the film right till the very last frame.