Prolific French filmmaker François Ozon’s latest feature, Frantz, is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 weepie Broken Lullaby, and there’s an appropriately timeless quality to the new film’s melodrama. The story centers on Anna (Paula Beer), the young fiancée of a German soldier recently slain in the Great War. She lives with his sober but loving parents (Ernst Stotzner and Marie Gruber), who regard the grieving woman as their de facto daughter-in-law. One day, Anna notices a mysterious mourner laying flowers on Frantz’s empty grave. Adrien (Pierre Niney) is French and claims to have befriended Anna’s fiancé when both men attended conservatory in Paris prior to the war.
Ozon and co-writer Philippe Piazzo turn Lubitsch’s achingly sincere story into something more cagey and prickly by concealing the nature of Adrien’s relationship to Frantz at the story’s outset. Viewers might suspect they have the secret puzzled out, but the reality is even more tragic than the film initially suggests. Gradually, the gentle, fretful Adrien begins to take on a kind of surrogate role in the lives of Anna and Frantz’s parents. It’s emotionally perilous territory, complicated by the politics of Germany in 1919. The mere presence of a Frenchman is enough to bristle the town’s patriots, but when romance seems to bloom between Anna and Adrien, the local mood turns downright menacing.
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At the core of Frantz are familiar sentiments about the necessity of noble lies and the heedless unpredictability of human emotion. While there’s nothing especially groundbreaking about the film, there’s still plenty to admire, from the lovely black-and-white photography to the nuanced, affecting lead performances from Beer and Niney. It’s melodrama executed with precision and a distinctly French note of bitterness. In a landscape of overwrought cinematic spectacle, there’s something to be said for a steep in Frantz’s staid, melancholy humanism.
The film opens Friday, April 7, at Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
