The Guardians.

Sunday morning, the sun is trying to shine, Anne Briggs is singing in my kitchen, and I have just made a cup of tea. All seems well, as long as I don’t think about the news from Afghanistan which is awful. I haven’t been up for long because I was watching a film last night until 2.00 in the morning. I stumbled across it on BBC4 when I was flicking around the channels for something to watch. It was a French film called The Guardians made in 2017 starring Nathalie Baye and Iris Bry. It is set during World War 1 on a farm in the Limousin region of France. The men have gone off to fight, get killed, injured, or go mad in the war and the women are left to do the arduous work on the farm. The farm owner Hortense hires an orphan girl Francine to help her on the farm. The story develops very slowly. All goes well at first, but tensions develop. What I particularly liked about the film was the beautiful cinematography and the attention to detail. It was almost like a painting by a French landscape artist. They used authentic farm tools of the period, and one could feel how tedious and back breaking the work must have been. Slowly, you can see how the lack of workers for farming during the period helped the development of farm machinery and the pleasure the women felt as combine harvesters and tractors were introduced. The acting of the two main characters was excellent. I read that Iris Bry had never acted before and was only discovered by chance by the casting director. That fact makes her performance all the more remarkable. I think some people might find the film too slow, but I enjoyed it. 

Iris Bry.

Apart from that, I didn’t do much else yesterday. I had to go to the Post Office because I sold two books, the Monty Don and the Ian Rankin, so it was good to get them off my land. I finished reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. I might tell you about that tomorrow when I have made some notes. I spent some time just staring out of the kitchen window. A family of starlings have moved in. I like watching them and the sparrows flying around. They go around in gangs. It is like the collective unconscious. I have seen some amazing films of starlings in a murmuration, but I haven’t got enough for one of those!. Anyway, I can’t think of anything else to tell you now. Enjoy Sunday.

Starlings Murmuration.