Frantz
(2016): written by Francois Ozon and Philippe Piazzo,
directed by Francois Ozon. Starring: Paula Beer, Pierre Niney,
Ernst Stoetzner, and Marie Gruber. Running Time: 113 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
Francois
Ozon’s latest work is almost surreal in how traditional it is in its storytelling
and style, unusual for someone more known for featuring bizarre psychological or
sexual twists in his films. Much like
its characters, set adrift in time by their suffering, the movie feels like a
relic from another era of cinema; this is helped in no small part by its mostly
black-and-white ascetic. It feels like
the sort of the classical drama most current historical Oscar-bait works wish
they could be, quietly complex in how it balances handling its historical
setting, its characters, and the strained emotional ties that bind them to each
other in ways both heartbreakingly sad and beautifully profound.
The
setting is Germany in 1919, right as the continent as a whole was struggling to
come to terms with the full scale of the senseless tragedy that was then
called, rather naively, “The War to End All Wars.” Within Germany, many are already beginning to
angrily reject their status as national “losers” and the harsh terms dictated
by the Treaty of Versailles. Not that any
of these larger geopolitical matters are of any importance to Anna (Paula Beer)-
she only has thoughts of her fiancé, Frantz, (with whose parents she now lives),
one of millions lost in the fighting, buried in an anonymous pit somewhere in
France. Wrapped in her grief, she has
lost her interest in just about everything in life, including the repeated
marriage proposals of one of the older men in town.
The
quiet, daily grieving of Anna and Frantz’s elderly parents, the Hoffmeisters,
is suddenly made far more acute when a strange Frenchman named Adrien (Pierre
Niney) appears at their doorstep, claiming to have known Frantz before the
war. Anna and Mrs. Hoffmeister are happy
to receive any new recollections of their lost loved one they can get, but Frantz’s
father can barely stand being in the same room with him, since, as he himself
puts it, “Every Frenchman is to me the murderer of my son.”
Despite
his initial resistance to speaking with the man, and despite a general attitude
of hostility Adrien elicits in nearly all of the townspeople (the raw emotional
wounds of war are never far beneath the surface in this film), they decide
anyway to try and overcome the pain and awkwardness of their first meeting. Soon, in small ways, powerful ways, they
start bringing the color back into each other’s world (literally!), as if they
are all finally giving themselves permission to heal and move forward. That is, until Anna begins to suspect that
there may be more to Adrien’s story about his relationship with Frantz than he
first let on.
While
there is, obviously, a LOT of potent emotional material to unpack here (and
nearly all of it is), that is, amazingly, only the first half of the
movie. After a first part that could
have stood as a great film all its own, the second part develops everything
further into a quasi-mystery yarn- Adrien seems to disappear after he returns
to Paris, and Anna resolves to go there herself to track him down. I lost count of the number of times I thought
the story was going to break a certain way, only to have it take an abrupt turn
down another road I hadn’t even considered before. There are so many ways Ozon could have
decided to make things play out, but the paths he ultimately chooses and the
various fates he selects for these people feel decidedly fitting.
The
key visual trick of the movie is a simple one, the use of color-as-metaphor,
but it’s expertly executed. Nearly the
entirety of the film is in black-and-white, especially the cities and towns, as
if war truly had sucked out all the variety of life. Nature, however, is often in color, as if
distance from human dwellings allows better detachment from the daily pains of
life. Moments of music or brevity in
conversation occasionally break through the veil and restore life to the world’s
pallet, a wonderful silent commentary on the power of art to aid in overcoming
grief. It’s the sort of basic, elemental
technique that could easily lend itself to overuse, but Ozon never allows this
card to be overplayed.
Much
of the film’s thematic subtlety can be found in the ways in which Adrien and
Anna’s separate journeys, each one taking them out of their comfort zones and
into a world strange to them, mirror each other. It is an unfortunately consistent side effect
of war that it leaves bitter feelings on every side. Not only does Adrien have to face
barely-concealed contempt from everyone he meets in Germany, Anna and the
parents soon start to get their share of angry looks from the townspeople just
for associating with him. Anna then
experiences her own version of this when she travels to France, getting a sharp
glance from a mother in a train when the conductor loudly announces she’s German. One of the most enduring shots in the entire
film is of her face through the train glass, watching a ruined shell of a town
fly by, its empty destruction reflected on her features. Anna doesn’t actually face that much in the
way of in-her-face discrimination once she arrives in Paris, so it’s an idea
that I wish could have been more fully fleshed out, but that may have bogged
down the film in unnecessary asides.
Frantz has the potential to be its own
kind of classic, a work that’s quiet and humble, but still quite confident in
itself as it moves us through the strange, winding, paths of recovery and
renewal that Anna and Adrien experience in their individual ways. It is a marvelous work, one that I hope to
see talked about and remembered for years to come.
-Noah Franc
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