‘Frantz’ subtly underscores the ravages of war
At the opening of “Frantz,” the intricately layered mystery from French writer-director François Ozon, a German woman named Anna (Paula Beer) visits the grave of her fiance, a soldier recently slain in the trenches during World War I. We sense the war’s immense reach in a few fleeting details — a man who whistles in Anna’s direction is missing an arm, an eerie quiet hangs over the town, and the movie’s black-and-white images have a somber cast.
If you happen to have seen Ernst Lubitsch’s “Broken Lullaby,” the 1932 antiwar drama on which this new film is based, you may notice that “Frantz” retains that earlier film’s premise. A Parisian musician named Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney) has come to pay his respects to Dr. Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and his wife, Magda (Marie Gruber), and share his memories of their fallen son, Frantz (played by Anton von Lucke in flashbacks).
But this story’s moral and dramatic fulcrum is Anna, whose protective attitude toward the Hoffmeisters is matched by her intense curiosity about this stranger.
Hoffmeister receives Adrien coldly at first, and so do the locals — including Kreutz (Johann von Bülow), who wants to marry Anna. Adrien’s recollections of many hours spent with Frantz in Paris before the war, visiting museums and playing the violin together, bring the Hoffmeisters some solace. But his sad eyes and halting speech seem to sug- gest a darker story.
That story will not be revealed here, though Ozon — a master of misdirection and a prolific chronicler of gay desire — raises possibilities that may be easier for an audience to countenance now than in 1919. Though “Frantz” hints that it might become a homoerotic drama, Ozon has something else up his sleeve.
One of the director’s aims is to eliminate the distractions of nationalism and politics and remind us of the unimaginable suffering endured on both sides. Notably, by christening the dead German soldier “Frantz,” Ozon playfully evokes France itself and possibly suggests that responsibility for a man’s death does not always belong to his killer alone.
At one point, Ozon goes so far as to deconstruct a famous scene from “Casablanca” and head in a new narrative direction, which begins when Anna boards a train for France to find answers for herself. She doesn’t know what either the past or the future holds but moves ahead with a bracing mix of clever calculation and pure instinct.
One key question Ozon explores is about the moral necessity of telling a falsehood. “Frantz” is a cunningly crafted film, full of visual artifice and narrative sleight-of-hand — which, by the end, seem completely sincere.