How many films about World War I have omitted female characters, or else relegated them to the margins, reduced to a face in a worn photograph or the scrawl in a tattered love letter? An austere corrective to more than a century of under-representation, “The Guardians” tells the other side of the story, focusing on the home front and the women — characters so often defined in relation to male soldiers, as mothers, wives, girlfriends, and children — who shouldered the burden of keeping French farms running while the men were away.
Inspired by prize-winning French author Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 novel, director Xavier Beauvois’ emotionally devastating adaptation — which some may find as arduous as the wartime chapter it depicts — dispenses with a fair amount of the suffering to be found in the book, forgoing the contemporary tendency toward gritty, handheld realism in favor of a more timeless, almost painterly aesthetic. Set in the Limousin region of France,...
Inspired by prize-winning French author Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 novel, director Xavier Beauvois’ emotionally devastating adaptation — which some may find as arduous as the wartime chapter it depicts — dispenses with a fair amount of the suffering to be found in the book, forgoing the contemporary tendency toward gritty, handheld realism in favor of a more timeless, almost painterly aesthetic. Set in the Limousin region of France,...
- 5/4/2018
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
The Guardians (Les Gardiennes) Music Box Films Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Director: Xavier Beauvois Screenwriter: Xavier Beauvois, Frédérique Moreau, Marie-Julie Maille, based on the novel by Ernest Pérochon Cast: Nathalie Baye, Laura Smet, Iris Bry, Cyril Descours, Gilbert Bonneau, Olivier Rabourdin, Nicolas Giraud Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 4/22/18 Opens: May 4, 2018 How ya […]
The post The Guardians Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
The post The Guardians Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
- 4/25/2018
- by Harvey Karten
- ShockYa
Nathalie Baye and Xavier BeauvoisThe strength of women left alone to fend for themselves is the communal focus of actor and director Xavier Beauvois’s The Guardians. After directing Of Gods and Men (2010), Beauvois’s excellent neo-western set among French monks in Algeria, we lost sight of this under-estimated director—his next was a quasi-comedy I’m dying to see about ruffians stealing Chaplin’s corpse—though it was a delight to encounter him earlier this year before the camera as one of Juliette Binoche’s many love (and sex) interests in Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In. I am very glad indeed that Beauvois is back in the director’s seat and in the international spotlight with The Guardians, adapted from an obscure 1924 novel by Ernest Pérochon about a struggling farmstead on the home front of the First World War, and one of the exceptional films of the year.
- 9/16/2017
- MUBI
Dear Kelley and Fern,I'm sorry your initial schedule has been thrown off, Kelley. Logistics and mindspace are always major challenges at film festivals, where so many have to juggle venues, runtimes, jet lag, walk-speed, hunger-levels, memory recall, wifi-access, note legibility, awkward conversation time-sinks, and many other disparate variables. As a Tiff-newcomer, I wonder what your impression is of the festival event so far? A more vivid festival contrast could not be better made than between Fernando’s distaste, which I share, for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and its false audacity, and the earthy mystery in Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, with its sublimely suggestive and tactile cosmogony of birth and motherhood.No surprise that the latter is programmed in the Wavelengths’ section curated by Andréa Picard, who has made a name for herself, her program, and Toronto's festival for spotlighting such boldly challenging and invigorating films. As I mentioned in...
- 9/14/2017
- MUBI
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