Les Guardiennes

The title is inadequately translated. The English “Guardians” is gender neutral. The French “Guardiennes” is explicitly feminine. 

That’s the point. This film, a noble return to the classic French narrative style, exalts the role women played during WW I, not just running the family farm but in preserving the family unit, the larger social structure and civilized values. 

As the first two shots explain, the men are off dead and dying on the battlefield. Meanwhile, back on the farm, it’s the matriarch Hortense pushing the plow behind the overworked mare.

The rural beauty of France stands in implicit contrast to the violent destruction wreaked in the war. 

While the school kids learn a poem about the inhumanity of the Bosch (translation: Krauts), a returning soldier shares his contrary wisdom: the enemy German soldiers were just like their enemy French, simple ordinary folk thrown into a conflict neither of their making nor of their will or understanding. But the deaths and dread and nightmares roll on. 

The film’s noblest soldier is Francine, the orphan girl Hortense hires to help in the harvest but who works her way into a permanent position with the family. That is, until their son Georges and she fall in love, threatening Hortense’s control. 

For being a responsible, even heroic guardian is not enough. What’s crucial is the values being guarded.  

Despite her affection and respect for Francine, Hortense lies about her virtue to dissuade son Georges from marrying her. She comes from nobody, she explains, with whoredom in her blood. Later Hortense refuses to tell Georges Francine is carrying his child. 

Thus Hortense meets what she sees her responsibility to maintain the family honour — letting Francine carry the guilt that daughter Solange has provoked — and  to consign George to marry his drab childhood friend Marguerite. That's a severely compromised "honour."

At this point the film’s domestic theme expands into French values, even European, indeed the entire Western Civilization that both World Wars ostensibly defended. Killing and dying for one’s values may be a fine virtue — but that depends on the values. And whether the values defended in war are sustained in peacetime.

The heroes’ martial valour is undercut by Hortense’s inhumanity both to her son and to his lover. She betrays her dutiful servant out of class snobbery, an exalted vanity and her need to keep control over her family. 

When she glimpses her unacknowledged grandchild, Hortense briefly realizes the horrible costs of her misdeed, even to herself. But she makes no amends. It’s too late or her strength has left her too weak to undo the damage she did the son she thought she was protecting and the woman who served her so faithfully..   

There’s a sting in the tail at the end of the narrative. The eldest son back from the war, the farm thriving and modernized thanks to the women’s initiative, the men fall to arguing over the division of the estate. The war briefly unified the men that can’t live in peace at home. 

The only harmony and cheer are provided by the triumphant and resourceful Francine. Raising her child on her own, she’s now also a locally successful singer, still brightening her world, though alone. 
       Poor Georges in the audience is still enchanted by her and will never understand his loss. He returned wounded from the war but emotionally crippled by his mother’s betrayal. He won the continental war but lost the domestic battle.