QPORIT

Frantz

François Ozon, France/Germany, 2016, 113m

The new film from acclaimed director François Ozon is a sublime, heartrending saga of guilt, forgiveness, and forbidden love in post–World War I Europe. Based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 antiwar drama Broken Lullaby, it charts the complex bond that forms between two strangers: Anna (Paula Beer), a young German woman grieving the loss of her fiancé, Frantz, in the war, and Adrien (Pierre Niney), a former French soldier. What plays out between them is a haunting investigation of postwar trauma and healing rendered in gorgeous black-and-white that occasionally gives way—gloriously—to psychologically charged bursts of color. A Music Box Films release. 

Thursday, March 2, 9:15pm (Q&A with François Ozon)

REVIEW:

I don’t know what the director intended, but for me this film is a meditation on lying.

The characters lie to each other, sometimes to comfort them; sometimes they lie to themselves, to assuage their grief, or imagine love, or dodge their own guilt and stoke their hate. The acting is styled, and the film is shot in highly stylized black & white, rather than natural behavior and color. Even the plot has some “contrivances” that I think are unlikely to occur in life: either the plot itself is a “lie” or the happiness it suggests is a lie, because this film takes place in the aftermath of WW I, and the story suggests the smoke that will turn into the inferno of WW II.

Pierre Niney - Adrien Rivoire

Paula Beer - Anna

Ernst Stötzner - Doktor Hans Hoffmeister

Marie Gruber - Magda Hoffmeister

Johann von Bülow - Kreutz

Anton von Lucke - Frantz Hoffmeister

Cyrielle Clair - La mère d'Adrien

Alice de Lencquesaing - Fanny