Les Gardiennes by Xavier Beauvois

Abstract

Reviewed by: Les Gardiennes by Xavier Beauvois Cheira Lewis and Véronique Machelidon Beauvois, Xavier, réal. Les gardiennes. Int. Nathalie Baye, Laura Smet, Iris Bry. Worso, 2017. Beauvois's film pays homage to the unseen female "adjuncts" of World War I, the women whose physical labor, spirit, and perseverance preserved France's rural heritage in the absence of the men who were drafted into the killing fields of the North. Based on a 1925 eponymous novel by Ernest Pérochon, the film focuses on the female keepers of the Paridier farm and was shot in the Limousin. Yet, in spite of its avowed feminist intention, the film's glorious photography by Caroline Champetier, the slow camera movements, carefully framed shots, and painterly celebration of a forgotten lifestyle complicate the message. Les gardiennes offers an ambiguous portrayal of female agency in a world abandoned by gods and men. Hortense (Nathalie Baye) is the matriarch, left in charge of the farm with daughter Solange (Laura Smet) after her two sons, Constant and Georges, and son-in-law Clovis have joined the French forces, in a stalemate with an enemy as helpless and disoriented as they are. To keep the farm in operation, Hortense hires young and capable Francine Riant (Iris Bry), an orphan from France's social welfare system. Thanks to the three women's joint efforts, the farm flourishes and the defunct male power is replaced through the purchase of an American-made combine harvester. Yet when Hortense finds her son Georges [End Page 192] attracted to Francine and her daughter Solange falling for an American soldier, the mother's conservative values and patriarchal beliefs kick in. Rather than bringing the successful and hard-working female outsider into the family, she prefers to dismiss Francine to secure her plan for Georges's marriage within the clan. Confronting the pregnant farm hand and Solange, Hortense sacrifices the truth to the restoration of male honor so that the farm can be handed back intact to the returning son-in-law. The matriarch consciously becomes the agent of female oppression and the restorer of patriarchal rule. Beauvois's cinematographic ode to pastoral beauty and to the timeless gestures of the laborers, in the style of Millet's Les glaneuses, evokes a world in limbo, indifferent to women's sufferings and desires. The repeated use of long still shots and slow pan shots, techniques perhaps borrowed from the documentary genre, further emphasizes the burden of tradition and the insignificance of individual desire. In the end, the true "feminist" hero of the film is not so much a "guardian" as a path-finder, when young Francine decides to rear her illegitimate child on her own and face the prejudices of her time, thereby paving a new way for women of the future. Significantly, this is revealed at the end of the film, when Francine, now a cabaret singer and single mother, interprets the song "Amours fragiles" and turns her back on the rural lifestyle and the farming family that betrayed her. While allowing her voice to resonate well into the closing credits, Beauvois's film celebrates (mourns?) a social order frozen in its traditions, which would need decades of change to accept female agency. Véronique Machelidon Meredith College (NC) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French