I saw Frantz two weeks ago at Cinemapolis in Ithaca, NY. It only ran for a few weeks so I couldn't watch it more then once. I live in Binghamton which is about one hour from Ithaca. Not too long of a drive but long enough to prohibit multiple viewings.
The director drew me to the film. France has quite a few directors working the Art House circuit. Ozon gained prominence over the last ten years. About a month ago I watched his film Swimming Pool which was a good genre film about an older Englishwoman who goes to France to write her next novel. So I decided to check out his latest feature.
It didn't disappoint. The film might turn off people who don't like foreign films or who don't like to read subtitles. Neither of these things turned me off. Yet the continual back and forth was a little hard to follow and I imagine that some of the translation wasn't as good as it should have been Even though, it was still an intriguing film.
It starts out in Germany and ends in France. It is sometime between the First World War and the Second. The main character is a German woman who lost her fiance in WWI. She is grieve stricken and mourns her fiance by going to the cemetery every day. While there she sees a mysterious man who is at the grave site of her dead fiance. Eventually the two meet and he reveals himself as a close friend of Frantz, the dead fiance. The woman and the mystery man become friends. He befriends Frantz's family too. We find out that Frantz was a Francophile at heart. He loved Paris and spent time there before the war. Even Frantz's father comes around to forgive and accept the mystery man.
Yet all is not what it seems. It a dramatic scene the mystery man reveals he is not a great friend of Frantz's but rather the man who killed him during the war. The film here goes into several flashbacks of battle between French and Germans in the trenches. They are well directed scenes that show the calamity of war. By this time in the film Frantz's ex-fiancee has fallen in love with the mysterious Frenchman; Adrien.
Adrien has left Germany in disgrace and has gone back to France. He writes a letter to Anna. Anna sets out to find Frantz to make sure he is steady psychologically. Eventually she finds her way to him only to find out he is engaged and living with his overbearing mother. In a fateful train scene Frantz and Anna are saying their goodbyes to one another. In the next scene she is the Lourve looking at a painting.
The film is flawless technically. It was shot in Black and White. And the drama is tense. It builds and builds to the big scene where Adrien confesses that he is not who he says he is. This revelation comes at about half way through the film. From there the rest is a journey by Anna to find Adrien and consecrate love between them.
I don't know of too many films that have dealt so in depth with the conflict between the French and the Germans. There is certainly a lot of material there. Two World Wars, the Occupation, the rivalry between the two countries. And Ozon's film is a great contribution to films that have dealt with WWI and it's aftermath. The film will get more attention in France and Germany than here in the states. I'm so glad it made it to a screen where I live. I would definitely pay it another viewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment