Frantz

Don’t directors grow up fast? One day they’re making kinky fairy tales (Criminal Lovers), mischievous sex comedies (Sitcom) or hair-raising horrors about lesbian baby snatchers (See the Sea), the next they’re delivering films that are all together more tasteful. If prolific French filmmaker François Ozon hasn’t already thrown off his enfant terrible reputation with wonderfully rich and nuanced works like Under the Sand, Time to Leave and In the House, then new film Frantz, an anti-war melodrama set just after the end of the first world war – which is welcome in the company of those three masterpieces – surely buries it for good.

Based on little-seen Ernst Lubitsch joint Broken Lullaby, Ozon’s latest offers plenty of surprises. First, the film is in black and white. Second, it often slips into vibrant colour whenever the mood lightens –  which isn’t too often, as it takes place in a rural German town in 1919, where a defeated country is licking its wounds and mourning its dead.

One of the fallen is the eponymous casualty of war, Frantz, who’s mourned by his beautiful young fiancee Anna (Paula Beer) and his kindly parents, the Hoffmeisters, with whom Anna still lives. At the opening of the film Anna discovers Frantz has another mourner: Adrien (Pierre Niney), a mysterious beanpole Frenchman with a handsome face and a neat little moustache, who's been leaving flowers at Frantz’s grave.

With his sad eyes and long face (literately and figuratively), he resembles a lost puppy dog, and Anna is soon taking him home to the folks. His welcome isn’t exactly warm, however. “Every Frenchman is my son’s murderer,” says Frantz’s doctor father. It’s a sentiment shared by most of the townfolks, but the doc soon mellows when he hears Adrien’s dreamy tales of his friendship with Frantz, which included days at the Louvre admiring sad Manet paintings and violin lessons that involved lots of gentle manoeuvring of the player from behind.

It wouldn’t be a Ozon film without a healthy hint of homoeroticism, and he lays it on thick here, but the relationship between the melancholic Frenchman and the dead German soon reveals itself to be less intimate and much more troubling from what’s initially implied. By this point, the Hoffmeisters, Anna and the audience have fallen for Adrien – fallen hard. Niney handles these early scenes masterfully, giving away just enough of his character to be charming, holding back just enough to remain an enigma to be solved.

Just as we discover how Adrien and Frantz’s lives intersect, the narrative focus shifts from the lanky Gaul to Anna. A passive almost-widow in the first half, she begins to resemble a private detective in the second as she heads to Paris. It’s a city she’s already witnessed secondhand through Frantz’s letters and conversations with Adrien, but seeing through your own eyes is altogether different. Slowly it becomes clear this is a film about the stories we tell ourselves, both big and small, just to get through the day; the truth can be too painful. It’s a theme Ozon has been whittling away at for his last few films now, and it’s elegantly rendered here in emotionally rich encounters that call to mind the melodramas of Max Ophüls and George Stevens.

Ozon’s genius as a filmmaker is the way he can turn thematically complex material into highly entertaining movies, and Frantz is one of his most impressive balancing acts. As well as stirring up big questions, Frantz will also have you swooning at its romance, and leaning forward to try and unknot its characters’ mysteries.