Frantz Review: French WWI-Era Mystery Takes on Modern Nationalism, Hate

Its a rare beauty, this odd-duck of a period piece from the great French director Franois Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool). Frantz starts out as a remake of the 1932 film Broken Lullaby by Ernst Lubitsch, a maestro whose work only a fool would mess with. But heres Ozon doing just that, taking the second half of the film down a different path thats sure to piss of purists. The filmmaker is walking a creative tightrope. How do you resist that? My advice is: dont. There are a few fits and starts, and a palette switch from black-and-white to color. But Ozon is onto something about nationalism, borders and a hatred of the other thats as timely as Trump.

Ozons script, adapted from a play by Maurice Rostand written before the Lubitsch film, is anchored by an image of a Frenchman putting flowers on the grave of a German soldier. The time is 1919, just after the World War I and the point of view has now been switched from the French victors to the German losers. Anna, powerfully played by German star Paula Beer, is mourning her fiance Frantz (Anton von Lucke, in flashbacks) , who was killed in the trenches. She lives with her late beaus parents, Dr. Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Sttzner) and his wife Magda (Marie Gruber). Anna is a keeper of the flame, so the sight of a Gallic gent named Adrien (Pierre Niney), the one leaving roses by Frantzs tombstone, startles her. Dr. Hofffmeister instinctively sees the stranger as the enemy (all Frenchmen killed my only son), but slowly warms as does Anna to his tales of her soldier boyfriend in Paris before the war, where the two men visited the Louvre and spent hours discussing Manets painting Le Suicid. Ozon keeps the homoerotic possibilities between Adrien and Frantz as subtext. And Annas attraction to this mysterious stranger leads her to follow him to Paris after they part on a note of brutal truth.

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Spoliers would do this spellbinder no favors lets just say that Ozon is most interested in the nationalist tendencies of France and Germany after the war. Unlike Lubitsch, whose film pointed to a peaceful truce between the two countries, the French director has the hindsight of World War II to show how mutual xenophobia only intensified the conflict. In contrasting cultural superiority and xenophobia against the healing power of art and forgiveness (is a lie often less painful than the truth?), Frantz is a film of its time and ours.