Frantz

seen on 8 May 2017

François Ozon directs Pierre Niney as Adrien and Paula Berry as Anna in a film loosely based by him on Ernst Lubitsch's 1931 film Broken Lullaby. 

The film begins in the Saxon town of Quedlinburg in 1919, where Anna is living with the parents of her fiancé Frantz who was killed in France during the War. Adrien, a tormented and fragile Frenchman, arrives and puts flowers on Frantz's grave, and makes himself known to the family. Where Lubitsch, adapting a play by Maurice Rostand, told the story from the Frenchman's point of view, Ozon is more interested in exploring Anna's experience, and he has re-arranged the revelations in the film accordingly, and pursued the story further.

It's a beautifully shot and composed film, mainly in black and white, but with suffusions of colour at moments of heightened emotion or of recollection of past happier times. Though Ozon deliberately used black and white because, he claims, our memories of the early twentieth century are largely constructed with reference to archival black and white photographs, the result is subdued and often melancholy, but not schmaltzy. Frantz's parents and Anna are all grief-stricken, but elsewhere in the town prejudice against a visiting French stranger so soon after the armistice could easily take a nasty turn.

Our expectations and early judgements about the nature of the film and the likely interactions of the characters are called into question by various revelations mid-way through. Ozon has remarked on the danger of losing sympathy by changing the direction of a film mid-stream, but he felt it was important to investigate the use of secrets and lies and how they can be both corroding and healing. 

The two leads carry the film extremely well, in particular Paula Beer as Anna, who gives an exceptional performance of a young woman closed off by grief, who sees a chance of happiness but has in the end to grow much more wise before really accepting that life must move on.

It's really difficult to discuss the nuances and issues raised by this film without giving away some of its own secrets, but while it makes references to the strident nationalist forces that will engulf Europe again in the succeeding years, it also shows the possibility of forgiveness and understanding at a personal level.