SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | François Ozon |
|---|---|
| Country | France/ Germany |
| Year | 2016 |
Frantz is one of François Ozon’s most beguiling and quietly radical films, a work that moves with the elegance of a classical period romance while carrying the emotional charge of a modern inquiry into grief, guilt and the fragile ethics of consolation. Loosely adapted from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby, and ultimately from Maurice Rostand’s play, Ozon’s version reshapes the material with a decisive shift in perspective. Instead of centring the story on the French visitor who arrives in Germany after the First World War, he places the young German woman left behind by the conflict at the heart of the narrative. This change gives the film its emotional depth and its moral complexity.
The year is 1919. Anna, played with luminous poise by Paula Beer, visits the grave of her fiancé Frantz, who died in the trenches. She discovers fresh flowers already laid there. The mourner is a foreigner, a Frenchman named Adrien Rivoire, played by Pierre Niney, whose presence is both shocking and intriguing. The man grieving for the German soldier she loved is from the nation that killed him. This opening encounter invites the audience to second-guess the connection between the two men, and Ozon sustains that sense of mystery with great finesse.
Adrien claims to have been close friends with Frantz during the young German’s pre-war stay in Paris. He recalls their visits to the Louvre, their shared love of music and poetry, and their long walks through the city. These memories, delivered with gentle sincerity, begin to soothe the grief of Frantz’s parents, Hans and Magda, with whom Anna lives. Even Hans, who initially declares that every Frenchman is his son’s murderer, softens under the weight of Adrien’s recollections. The film takes pains to show the cultural affinities between France and Germany, two nations that shared artistic tastes even as they tore each other apart.
But Frantz is built around a lie, a deception that is best discovered within the film itself. Ozon uses this lie not as a narrative trick but as a way to explore the emotional wounds left by war. Can a falsehood bring comfort. Can it heal. Or does it merely postpone the reckoning that grief demands. These questions echo through the film, aligning it with other works that probe the ethics of consolation, such as The Lives of Others or Atonement.
Visually, the film is one of Ozon’s most striking achievements. Shot largely in black and white, it occasionally blooms into colour at key emotional moments. The first such shift occurs when Adrien describes Frantz’s favourite painting, a Manet canvas of a man with his head thrown back. When the painting finally appears, it depicts a suicide, a revelation that deepens the film’s meditation on despair. The colour sequences also illuminate moments of connection, such as Anna and Adrien’s hike in the mountains, where the gloom briefly lifts and the possibility of new feeling emerges. The contrast between the monochrome present and the warm colour of memory becomes a visual metaphor for the tension between mourning and the desire to move forward.
As the story progresses, Anna becomes the film’s true protagonist. When one of her letters to Adrien is returned without a forwarding address, she travels to Paris to find him. The film shifts tone, shedding its elegiac stillness for something closer to a Hitchcock mystery. Anna moves through a world of secrets and half truths, consulting a priest for guidance and confronting the moral uncertainty of whether truth is always the right path. Her journey is both literal and emotional, a search for meaning after the collapse of her future.
Frantz is an antiwar film without battle scenes. Its critique lies in its depiction of the emotional wreckage left behind. Ozon shows the lingering hostility between nations, but also the shared humanity that persists beneath it. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Hans confronts a group of grieving fathers, asking who killed their sons. Not the enemy, he insists, but the fathers themselves, who sent them to the front.
The film’s final movement becomes a modernist fable, a reflection on truth, illusion and the stories we tell to survive. Paula Beer’s performance is beguiling, her silky self-possession anchoring a film that moves between mourning and mystery with remarkable grace. Frantz is a beautifully calibrated work, a tale of love, loss and the fragile hope that remains when the world has been shattered.
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