A 19th-century French farming village, minus the men, in Marine Franssen's THE SOWER

How this little village comes to be missing all its adult males is a nasty part of French history involving the coup d'état of 1851, during which males thought to be sympathizers with the republican cause were rounded up and either killed or imprisoned. As usual with coups of this sort, those in charge could care less what happens to either the men or the villages left "male-less" due to an would-be emperor's craving for power.

In THE SOWER (as ironic and double-edged a title as you're likely to find), a movie directed and co-written by Marine Franssen, the women of this bereft little farming town take into their own very capable hands matters involving everything from sowing and harvesting to school-teaching and sex.

That last, of course, proves both pivotal and the raison d'être of the film that Ms Franssen, shown at left, has given us -- adapted from the short story, L'Homme semence, by Violette Ailhaud.

I suppose it is not too much of a spoiler -- since the tag line at the bottom of the poster, top, points this out -- to mention that the women of this village have made a pact: We agreed, if a man come someday, he'd be all of ours.

As you will expect, a man does indeed come, and before long, as you will also expect, some sexual sharing is in the offing.

If this sounds a little too much like a century-old, costume version of something as sleazy as Indecent Proposal or its more current and not-to-be-missed version (if you enjoy exquisitely attuned trash), What/If on Netflix streaming, you can rest easy. Because The Sower is ripe, all right, but with the genuine feeling of sisterhood between the women of this little village, both the younger set and the older, all of whom work together to achieve what needs to be done to keep things intact, until -- if ever -- their men return.

When a single man does appear -- nicely played by the very-attractive-if-intentionally-closed-off Alban Lenoir (above) -- this fellow does what you'd expect, especially as he is initially "courted" by the most attractive and virginal of the town's young ladies, given a precise yet muted performance by an actress new to me, Pauline Burlet (below), who brings a pleasing combination of beauty and keen intelligence to her role.

What happens here is both expected and maybe not, with a result that is primal and completely understandable, given the unusual circumstances of this village. Best of all, there are no villains here -- except of course the royal powers-that-be. Instead, people act in their own best interests but also, finally, in the interests of the village.

By the quietly moving finale, The Sower has become a kind of unusual, unending love story in which there is sorrow and parting but also regeneration and hope. Ms Franssen has given us a tale that could have easily degenerated into mere, if pleasing, eroticism and instead suffused it with compassion, morality, humanity and a deep understanding of desire, need and what you might call not merely mutual sexual satisfaction but something a good deal more "overall."

From Film Movement, in French with English subtitles and running an appropriate 98 minutes, The Sower seems to have bypassed any U.S. theatrical release to go straight to home video, hitting the street on DVD and digital streaming this past Tuesday, June 11 -- for purchase or rental. Seek this one out, it you enjoy intelligent, thought-provoking love stories.

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.

SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY -- Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel's food and farming doc opens

When we think about our food and where it comes from, the last thing on many of our minds is the humble little seed. Those of us who follow the ever-rising control of big corporations worldwide, however, may think first of seeds, and then of power-hungry behemoths such as Montsanto, soon, it would seem, to be merged into Bayer, an even bigger power-hungry behemoth: (You can register your disapproval of that merger by clicking here).

SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY, a new documentary from Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel, very smartly begins with a kind of history of seeds, introducing us to an ex-hippie farmer, shown below, who has now collected literally thousands of varieties of seeds, and who tells us that, sadly, we've lost 94 percent of our seed diversity during the 20th Century.

It was wise of the filmmakers to provide us this seed history and importance before showing us what the reign of Capitalism and "hybrid seeds," along with corporations and their venal and ridiculous idea of "patenting" nature are doing, with the help of slime balls like Clarence Thomas, surely the sleaziest member of our current Supreme Court. Next we move to Mexico and the fascinating story/history of corn. "We are seeds," explains one of several of the Indians who guide us through all this, as we are made to see and understand the kind of love that goes into caring for seeds. (Seed farming and seed banks, we learn, are now internationally connected.)

We visit Hawaii and watch as neighbors and whole communities protest the poisoning of their land and their children via toxic pesticides. We learn that NAFTA, by selling subsidized corn in Mexico, has forced two million farmers off their land. We see something similar in India, thanks to -- yes, again -- Montsanto. We view "Seed schools" in action via the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, an organization devoted to increasing, rather than further depleting, seed diversity.

Seed: The Untold Story is a vitally important documentary, subject-wise, at least. But, as you may have gathered from the above paragraphs, its approach to its subject is scattershot and all over the place. Also, for anyone who has followed the subject of food and farming via the number of good documentaries that have appeared over the past decade or two, the movie cannot help but seem repetitive. A figure such as Vandana Shiva, above, has already made some 78 appearances on film and TV, including the documentaries Dirt! The Movie and Solutions locales pour un désordre global. (Click the preceding link and then scroll way down for my review of that latter film.)

Filmmakers Betz and Siegel (shown above, with Betz on the left) are to be thanked for their efforts, even if the end result does not rise artistically to the level of importance of the subject itself. There are still plenty of things to be learned and gained from viewing this movie.

Seed:The Untold Story -- from Collective Eye Films and running 94 minutes -- opens this Friday, September 23, in New York City at the Cinema Village and the following Friday, September 30, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Monica Film Center.

Will the film be shown elsewhere? I have no idea, and since it does not yet even appear on the Collective Eye web site, don't expect any help there, either.

Heartbreaking/groundbreaking nostalgia in Catherine Corsini's best so far: SUMMERTIME

Taking place in France in the 1970s, among a group of early feminists pushing the boundaries of the French in ways -- women's rights, gay rights, abortion -- for which the French were unprepared, Catherine Corsini's newest film is up there with her best, which would include for my taste The New Eve (1999), La répétition (2001), Leaving (2009) and Three Worlds (2012). In fact, I think SUMMERTIME (La belle saison) is her best yet. It takes us back to a period that the older of us will remember well (even if we weren't in France at the time, what occurred there was simultaneously going on throughout much of the western world), and Ms Corsini captures both events and characters with a hand as deft as it is subtle & cinematic.

The filmmaker, shown at left, casts her films especially well, too -- sometime surprising us with her choice of stars. Emmanuelle Béart made a fine impression in La Repetition, and more than any other of Karin Viard's films, The New Eve helped place this supporting actress on the map to stardom. Kristin Scott Thomas is always fine, but Leaving gave her one of her strongest roles, while Three Worlds offered Clotilde Hesme and Raphaël Personnaz characters that brought out new richness and depth in both performers.

Corsini tends to tackle themes involving both class issues and "the other," with the latter sometimes hinging on one's sexual orientation. So it is again with Summertime, in which a beautiful young farm girl, Delphine (a glowing performance from Izïa Higelin, below), after enduring her parents' constant pushing her into marriage with some local boy and when a secret lesbian affair goes south, takes off for the big city in an attempt to discover another life. Which she manages -- in spades.

In Paris, Delphine falls into an activist women's group, where she meets Carole (another knockout performance from César-winning actress Cécile De France, shown below),  and a relationship blooms.

How this happens is presented believably on both an emotional and societal level, with genuine feeling and attention given to Carole's male partner (beautifully nuanced by Benjamin Bellecour) whom she must give up for Delphine. The same feeling and caring is provided the young man in Delphine's farm community who has been in love with her since childhood (a wonderful, heartbreaking performance from Kévin Azaïs. below, right).

The only other major character is played by that fine French actress, Noémie Lvovsky, below, who brings enormous strength and anger to her role of Delphine's mother, who cannot begin to accept anything but the standard straight-and-narrow sexual relationship for her daughter. Ms Lvovsky has one of the film's strongest and most difficult scenes, and she wipes the floor with it.

But Corsini's movie rightly belongs to her two lead actresses, who play with and off each other quite beautifully throughout. Ms De France's versatility is by now well known. Here we view more of her physically than we ever have, and she proves something to see. As does Ms Higelin (this film should ramp her career into high gear), who has such a buoyant and contagious liveliness than viewers of any gender or preference should easily fall for her -- either/both sexually and/or aesthetically. She is something special.

Corsini's strength here is in bringing us equally close emotionally to the highs and lows of the relationship, as well as making us understand and feel the social/societal difficulties implicit in such a bonding back in the distant 1970s. Both these strands come together to deliver a richly textured, marvelously empathetic movie. Don't miss it.

Summertime -- from Strand Releasing (this independent/foreign film distributor is on one hell of a roll lately!) and running 105 minutes -- opens this Friday, July 22, in New York City (at the IFC Center and Film Society of Lincoln Center) amd in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal, Playhouse 7 and Claremont 5), and then in another half dozen or more cities in the weeks to come. Click here, then click on Screenings on the tool bar halfway down the screen to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Nanouk Leopold's IT'S ALL SO QUIET: small, truthful Dutch "family film" opens at AFA

What a tiny treasure is this film about father and son farmers in an isolated area of The Netherlands. The father, very old and very infirm, is cared for -- grudgingly but decently -- by his middle-aged son. The son, however, is cared for by no one and apparently never has been. (The little we learn of his growing up indicates that his father was unduly harsh with him.) This is the heart of the sad, engrossing movie, IT'S ALL SO QUIET (Boven is het stil) that is full of small details -- of caring for the elderly as well as for farm animals -- that builds into a quietly moving study of loneliness and the inability of some of us to ever be able to reach out to anyone else.

As adapted (from the novel by Gerbrand Bakker) and directed by Nanouk Leopold (shown at left), the movie may be slow-moving but it is never uninteresting due to its expert detailing and how simple and subtle it consistently is. Ms Leopold keeps her camera ever watchful regarding the connection between father and son and between son and farm and the few other people who attempt to bridge what seems an incredible distance between them and this sad and unresponsive farmer.

As played by the late Jeroen Willems (above, left), whose untimely death occurred soon after the film was completed, the son, Helmer, is a figure of enormous empathy by us viewers, even though the character himself barely seems able to empathize with others or understand himself and his own needs.

The scenes of Helmer caring for his father (played by Henri Garcin, above, left) offers a look at the day-to-day drudgery -- cleaning up the shit, showering the old man, and the increasingly difficult chore of simply carrying him up the stairs -- that goes into the care of the very elderly.

We also slowly get a sense of the kind of upbringing Helmer must have had, in which showing affection of any kind was frowned upon. Now, this man is so socially insecure and untutored in anything approaching the social graces that he simply cannot respond in any normal way to other people's overtures. (The milk delivery man, above, clearly would like to pursue a relationship with Helmer, but can draw no response except embarrassment from our man.)

When more help is finally needed -- with the farming and the caregiving -- a young hired hand named Henk is brought aboard (Martijn Lakemeier, above, right), and it seems that a kind of break-through may come for Helmer. Things do happen and change does occur, but in the barest of increments. Possibilities lie unseen and unused, and the movie remains sad but ever-so-slightly hopeful.

The film begins and ends with some lovely shots of nature, and the natural world breaks into the narrative now and then. But what you'll remember most, I think, are the shots of the faces here, especially that of Willems, who gives a remarkable performance, all the deeper and more resonant due to his character's inability to connect.

Its All So Quiet -- from Jonathan Howell's Big World Pictures and running 91 minutes, in Dutch with English subtitles) -- begins a one-week run this Friday, January 9, at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Click here for tickets and here for directions. Elsewhere? I'm not certain. But, being from Big World, there will most likely be a DVD on offer eventually and/or some digital streaming.

AT ANY PRICE: Ramin Bahrani at work this time on a larger canvas--with mixed results

There's a lot to appreciate and (mostly) enjoy about AT ANY PRICE, the new film from Ramin Bahrani -- the fellow who, over nearly a decade, has given us three small films, all good to varying degrees, each of which has taken place in a constrained time frame and has centered on very few characters, one of them an immigrant to the US: the early and somewhat overpraised Man Push Cart, the better Chop Shop, and his best film so far, Goodbye Solo. Now, what a surprise it is to find him deep in America's heartland, writing and directing the story of a successful farming and seed-selling family with an increasingly tenuous hold on decency.

Like the "bad seeds" they sell -- genetically "enhanced" and then patented: think Monsanto (though the name given them here is the irony-laden "Liberty") -- this family, too, is saddled with its own not-so-hot seedling, played very well by Zac Efron (above, left), in a performance moving from light, bright and sexy to increasingly dismal and dark.

Mr. Bahrani (at left), born in North Carolina of Iranian parents, would seem to have a good perspective from which to come at his earlier work, and perhaps at this one, too. He gets good performances from his cast, particularly from the males (the females seem of somewhat lesser interest to the filmmaker, and this has been true in all his films, which are designed to be about the male and his travail). Bahrani and his cinematographer (Michael Simmonds) and cast capture the look, sound and feel -- in fact, the whole social context -- of our so-called heartland quite well, whether the scene be race-car driving, farming, funerals, town meetings or church services.

In the film's leading role Dennis Quaid, above, gives another of his good-ol-boy-with-an-edge performances that, while threatening to go over the top, never does and instead helps anchor the movie via his character's sometimes creepy combination of family-and-business-above-all.

This reflects, on a larger scale, what Quaid's main competition and more successful businessman (played well by Clancy Brown) is doing with his own family and business. It is also carried a very big step further in what that seed company is after: total power, along with total control.

Bahrani shows us the American dream, decaying from within and without. And his movie reaches for real tragedy at its finale, via an event which ought to be -- and on the surface is -- joyful and celebratory, yet could hardly be darker, given what we now know. (That's Kim Dickens, above, right, good as always, in her too-limited role as the materfamilias.)

What prevents the film from taking flight into the genuinely tragic mode to which it so clearly aspires is the occasional coincidence and then some full-out melodrama that Bahrani has allowed into his scenario (spoilers ahead, in the next sentence). A sexual tryst too conveniently overheard and seen by the film's most compelling female character (Efron's girlfriend, played smartly and genuinely by Maika Monroe, shown, left, above and below), followed by a far too obvious piece of violence, staged rather heavy-handedly (you can see the supposed corpse breathing -- or maybe that's the point: they bury a man who's not dead?). During all this, you first hope that the filmmaker will not go there, for it's too typical and simple-minded. Once he does, you can only suspend your disbelief.

Which is too bad, because there's a lot to like here. Efron, shown above and below, continues to grow; he was brave to take on a role this surprisingly negative. For his part, Bahrani proves he can work on a much larger canvas, even if, at last, the movie gets away from him.

At Any Price -- from Sony Pictures Classics and running 105 minutes -- opens this Wednesday, April 24, in Manhattan at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema and in the Los Angeles area at the Arclight Hollywood 15 and The Landmark. Click here to see currently scheduled playdates, cites and theaters.

A guy and his ox: OLD PARTNER, from Chung-Ryoul Lee, opens at Film Forum

Chung-Ryoul Lee's OLD PARTNER (Wonangsori) brings you up close to -- not just death and dying but -- lives lived in the senior years without much vari-
ation, little hope and what appears to be a zero degree of joy. Despite some truly lovely photography, with compositions that are breathtak-
ingly beautiful, all the more so because of their simplicity, the lives we see are full of drudgery, and the film Lee has made from these lives threatens to descend into that same kind of hell. That is does not (though for me it comes awfully close) is to the credit of the director, who in this, his first docu-
mentary, captures an elderly Korean farming couple and their ox -- the old partner of the title -- with as much tact as feeling. The two humans seem barely to be surviving, and the local veteranarian has diagnosed a soon-to-happen death for their ox, who looks more than ready for it.

Director Lee provides no narration and but a few super-titles of explanation, along with the subtitles for the spoken words (there are not that many), so we don't know what kind of life these people led in their younger years. All we see is a single photograph, though mention is made by the wife of children who would not want to be burdened with these parents. So we watch and wait, as their tiresome and constant work goes on, and the husband in particular, tries to find a way out of their problems. When he takes the ox to market, no one is buying, and the old farmer seems to be the butt of many jokes.

He picks and then feeds a passel of dandelions to the creature, much to the consternation of his wife -- who notes that he wouldn't do the same for her. This woman is a complainer -- first, last and always -- and while she certainly seems to have every right to do this and much to complain about, she does grow tiresome. Her husband is going deaf, though from time to time this deafness seems to be by choice. Who can blame him, considering what he is constantly forced to hear.

The ox, a symbol if ever there was one, is as much an object of derision by the wife and the locals as of love from the farmer. This is the animal's movie in a major way, and I doubt you'll be able to erase the image of those big brown eyes -- sad and enduring -- from your mind.

Old Partner opens at Film Forum tomorrow, Wednesday December 30, for a one-week-only run.