An artist’s eye

There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame all but freezes, and the film seems to have taken a left turn into an exhibition of fetching French landscapes and interiors from the early 20th century. The camera hovers over the harrowed earth, admires the sturdy sunlit front of a farmhouse, lingers thoughtfully on a face. The running time of 138 minutes could easily have been slashed to 100 by a heartless editor. But this is un film de Xavier Beauvois, a specialist in painterly exactitude.

The writer-director’s greatest success came in 2010 with Of Gods and Men. This, too, had some of the trappings of a major box-office turn-off. It was set in a tormented Cistercian monastery in North Africa, from which it derived its muted aesthetic tone and extremely careful pace. And yet it was as gripping as it was heart-rending and won sundry awards in France and beyond. Many of the same virtues are at play in The Guardians, right down to the table scenes (no one shoots the breaking of bread like Beauvois).

In the background is the first world war, evoked in an opening shot of gas-masked bodies slumped among fallen leaves. Thereafter we are spirited to a farm. On a flat, wintry expanse in 1915 the women of the Sandrail family till the land in the absence of able-bodied men — two sons and a son-in-law. The following year (the years, discreetly captioned, come and go until we finish up in 1920), one of those sons reappears in uniform brandishing a medal, but soon heads back to the front whence, it is implied with a heavy heart, he will never return.