The Guardians movie review & film summary (2018)

The director, who currently has a juicy supporting role as Juliette Binoche’s arrogant, married lover in “Let the Sunshine In,” is far more respectful and appreciative here of the many crucial roles women play. And in Nathalie Baye, Laura Smet and newcomer Iris Bry, he has three very different actresses through whom to explore the film’s themes. (Beauvois wrote the script with Marie-Julie Maille and Frederique Moreau, based on Ernest Perochon’s 1924 novel “Les Guardiennes.”)

Part of the allure of “The Guardians” comes from the casting: The radiant, real-life mother and daughter Baye and Smet play mother and daughter Hortense and Solange. The year is 1915, and both of Hortense’s sons have been away at war, as has Solange’s husband. All three men come and go over the course of the film, but the ladies require more consistent help year-round, with dreams of modernizing their operation looming wistfully in the distance. (This may be a spoiler, but you’ll never see another movie featuring not one but two scenes of characters reacting joyfully to the arrival of a tractor.)

They get some much-needed assistance when the bank in the nearby village sends them 20-year-old farm laborer Francine (Bry) instead of the loan they’d sought to buy new equipment. With her blazing red hair and milky, fair skin against a backdrop of the farmhouse’s bright blue door, Francine stands out from the moment she arrives, and she’ll eventually serve as the catalyst that shakes things up for the whole family. (You could think of “The Guardians” as a really sad, really slow version of “Tully.”)

Francine takes her cues from the steely Hortense: milking the cows in the morning, harvesting wheat in the afternoon and casting seeds about at dusk. When winter comes, she splits logs in the blindingly sunlit snow. Beauvois lingers over the minutiae of these moments, allowing us to focus on the arduousness and monotony of the tasks, with the sounds of the work creating a rhythm. If you’re interested in movies about process, or people doing their jobs well, you’ll be enthralled.

When the men do return on leave for brief periods, they don’t speak of the violence they’ve endured, but they’re clearly changed. “The Germans are people like us,” Solange’s husband, Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin), informs his family over dinner—teachers and farmers like them.

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