A family of French farmers deals with World War I in Xavier Beauvois' THE GUARDIANS

Ah, a new film from Xavier Beauvois! This is the fellow who gave us both Le Petit Lieutenant and Of Gods and Men, two films that TrustMovies enjoyed very much. And yet, when I went to further research Beauvois on the IMDB, I was shocked to discover that, while I think of this man more as a filmmaker than an actor, I had actually seen much more of his work in the latter category than the former. His acting is perfectly fine, but it's as writer/director that I most remember him -- particularly for his multi-award-winning Of Gods and Men.

M. Beauvois, shown at left, is an unhurried movie-maker. He takes his sweet time and concentrates on the details -- of character, situation, location and time period. While this can make his filmmaking slow-paced as was, even to some extent, his police procedural, Le Petit Lieutenant, his work is never for a moment uninteresting. His latest entry as director and co-adapter (with Marie-Julie Maille and Frédérique Moreau) of the novel by Ernest Pérochon, is THE GUARDIANS (Les gardiennes), a story of World War I set entirely on the French home front with not a scene of war-time action to be found.

Oh, the movie begins clearly and cleverly enough with a long tracking-the-landscape shot of dead bodies, some of these wearing gas masks, so we immediately know the WWI time frame. Yet, once the film's story begins we never leave that home front -- the farm and the village in which our group of main characters live and labor.

Yes, young male characters come and go (early on, one of the sons of the family comes home for a short leave, followed by the leave of a second son and a son-in-law), only to be killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the Germans. Yet we never see any of this; we only hear about it second-hand.

This means we concentrate mostly on the womenfolk who must carry on just as before, but without the help of the stronger males. The work, if you know anything about farming (and a century ago!), is difficult, often back-breaking, and near-constant, yet these women must manage it.

The film's female leads include the mother (the usually glamorous Natalie Baye, above, looking as plain and aged as we've ever seen her),

her daughter (the lovely and, as as one character calls her, "elegant" Laura Smet, above), and a young worker the family must hire as help who has only recently left the orphanage in which she was raised (the wonderful red-haired newcomer Iris Bry, shown below and on poster, top, whom we are certain to see again soon).

What happens to all these folk, women and men, is as believable, sometimes terrible and always understated as life itself. Beauvois and his co-writers have managed to include so little coincidence into their film that when a sample of that credibility-ripping stuff suddenly happens (involving an overseen kiss), it comes as quite a shock. But I think any film deserves a single instance of this, so you'll probably be able to let this one pass. (Downton Abbey this movie definitely is not.)

Performances are everything you could want them to be --  as real as the farmhouse dirt. These people are not big on a lot of talking, so we get used to the silence and visual routine of their lives and then hang on their occasional words, as events pile up and more needs to be said.

The great strength of Beauvois and his cast and crew's work is that though some terrible things happen, some out of the characters' control, others firmly within that control, we are somehow able to understand the dreadful injustice of all this -- given, especially, the time and place. That our heroine is able to accept this and move on is difficult but salutary, and the filmmaker never underscores her achievement with the usual soaring music and feel-good stance. Instead The Guardians (ironic title, that) achieves its ends in all too ordinary but appropriate ways. This is good, strong, rooted filmmaking, and I hope you will give it a viewing.

From Music Box Films, in French with English subtitles and running 135 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, May 4, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and on the following Friday, May 11, in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Royal and Playhouse 7. In the weeks following, the film will hit another 15 or so cities. Click here and then click on THEATERS on the task bar half-way down the screen to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and venues.

Xavier Beauvois' OF GODS AND MEN opens: the worthwhile uses of religious faith

If you follow this blog much, you'll know how little use TrustMovies has for religion of any kind -- or even a belief in what's-his-name. Yet TM was greatly moved, provoked and made to think and feel strongly by the new film from Xavier Beauvois, shown below, who a few years back gave us the fine Le Petit Lieutenant. His new movie OF GODS AND MEN is about faith: that experienced by a group of monks in Northern Africa who, for years, have ministered to the generally impoverished local people living around their hilltop monastery, and who, when civil war and terrorist acts threaten the lives of all foreigners in the area, must decide whether or leave Africa, as both the French and Algerian governments suggest/command, or  to stay and continue what they see as God's work and their job.

The monks' decision, how they arrive at it, and what follows shortly after is the meat of this two-hour movie, which is among the best of the year, from any country. In one of the unaccountable, and I am afraid rather typical (and for film lovers, shameful) acts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences this year was to not even shortlist the movie for Best Foreign Language Film and instead nominate a piece of dreck boasting one clever idea with little follow-through (but lots of transgressive sex and other odd behavior -- Dogtooth -- in order, one assumes, to prove its ability to be meaninglessly au courant. Of Gods and Men, which, in addition to being a fine and artful film, actually rose to the top of the French box-office for several weeks when it opened in its home country last year. The French, of course, occasionally allow challenging films with ideas and gravity to trump comedies and those films with special effects -- as even we do when something like The Social Network comes along.

Of Gods and Men deals with the hastening threat to the lives of these Christian monks, shown above, as well as with their day-to-day activity helping the Muslim locals (below), and the peaceful co-existence of the two religions is heartening to see -- until it begins to fall apart, through no fault of either the locals or the monks. The film appears to put the blame nearly equally on the pro-fundamentalist, anti-Algerian-government forces -- and perhaps even more so on the failing Algerian government itself. What happened to these monks is now history but who did the deed (or ordered it done) seems less certain.

As the danger nears and grows, and the monks themselves argue whether to stay or go, you'll find yourself hanging on every word and being jerked one way, then another. Over time, and as the monks talk and think and pray, minds change and a more mutual understanding looms.

Meanwhile, the insurgents come to the monastery for medical help -- and being good Christians, the monks provide it. (That's the indispensable octogenarian Michael Lonsdale, above, as the monk most familiar with medicine.)

The leader of the group is played by the oft-seen, handsome leading man Lambert Wilson (above, left), and this role is perhaps his finest among many good ones. All the monks, as well as the few locals we come to know at all, are well cast and make their characters as memorable as possible under circumstances that shorten and darken as the movie proceeds.

What makes Of God and Men so special is that Beauvois and his cast treat faith as something from which acts -- not simply thoughts and feelings -- are fashioned, and so becomes as meaningful for the people who possess it as life itself.  The viewer need not even believe in the existence of a higher power to cheer these strong, frightened, torn and caring men. Their work, their lives prove reason enough.  The film -- from Sony Pictures Classics -- opens this Friday, February 25, in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Landmark Sunshine, and in Los Angeles at The Landmark. Further cities and theaters will shortly follow.