‘Frantz‘ is one of those films that follows you long after the screening is over. What I and maybe many other viewers of François Ozon‘s 2016 film will remember years from now will be the silhouettes of the two principal heroes – the beautiful German young woman Anna (interpeted by Paula Beer) whose lover, Frantz, fell on the front two months before the end of the First World War and the out-of-world French young man Adrien Rivoire (actor Pierre Niney) who is also an ex-soldier, has met Anna’s lover some time in the past, and comes to put flowers on his empty grave and ease the grief of Anna and Frantz’s parents. One may say that Pierre Niney is a miscast, and maybe this is true, but he is a miscast not as an actor, but in the world his fate was to live in.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5029608/
Frantz himself gives the name of the film, as all characters are tormented by his absence, his falling in the war makes him the victim, but actually everybody in this film is a victim of the absurdity of the war. The film succeeds to present in a moving manner how destinies are cut short by war, and how difficult are healing, forgetting, forgiving. It also asks questions about the capability of humans to cope with the horrors of the past – can they do it while facing the truth which is sometimes more cruel than their imagination allows? Or maybe lies are allowed when they can help healing or avoid reopening fatal wounds?
Ozon’s film also carries an anti-war message. The heroes belong to the two sides of a war that created devastation for both nations. One may have been victor, the other defeated, but both countries are in ruins, millions of lives were lost, the survivors continue to carry the scars of the war traumas but also the germs of hate that will be at the root of the next war. The symmetry of scenes and situations may seem demonstrative, but it’s good to remember that blood, enmity and mistrust divided Europe no so long ago.
The film makes use of black and white for the majority of the time, with colors inserted in some key moments, without necessarily marking the borders between reality and imagination, past and present, truth or fiction. It was a very good idea in my opinion to avoid the trap of a happy ending and to leave more ambiguity in place, with a mysterious lesser known painting of Manet handling to the viewers the key to what may have happened next. Questions marks are relevant for both past and future.