Frantz movie review & film summary (2017)
Based on the 1932 anti-war drama “Broken Lullaby,” itself inspired by a Maurice Rostand play whose title shall go unremarked here as it technically constitutes a spoiler, “Frantz” begins in the small German town of Quedlinburg just after the end of World War I and focuses on Anna (Paula Beer), still mourning the death of her fiancée, Frantz Hoffmeister (Anton von Lucke), on the battlefield a year earlier. One day, while visiting Frantz’s grave, she discovers a mysterious Frenchman named Adrien (Pierre Niney) has been paying his respects as well. Anna confronts Adrien, who tells her that he and Frantz were friends in Paris before the war. Delighted by this, she brings Adrien back to the home that she shares with Frantz’s parents, Hans (Ernst Stötzner) and Magda (Marie Gruber), so that they can meet him. At first, Hans rejects the idea of meeting him, but a thaw begins to develop, and the Hoffmeisters welcome Adrien into their home so that he can regale them with tales involving him and Frantz in Paris before the war.
Something also seems to be slowly developing between Adrien and Anna as well. While the Hoffmeisters are perfectly happy with this, fully recognizing the need for her to get on with her life, others in town are not quite as forgiving, especially Kreutz (Johann von Bulow), who has been pressing Anna hard to marry him despite her utter lack of interest. He is also appalled by the prospect of losing her hand to anyone else, let alone a Frenchman. It is only a matter of time before the other shoe drops and Adrien abruptly returns to France after revealing some shocking news. Anna impulsively decides to follow him and as she searches the places that Adrien mentioned in his tales of him and Frantz in the hopes of tracking him down, she makes some additional discoveries about him. More directly, she finds herself trying to discover whether she sees Adrien as just a substitute for her dead Frantz or as the beginning of a new and unexpected chapter in her own life.
When Lubitsch told this story back in 1932, World War I had been over for only 14 years and therefore no doubt resonated strongly with audiences still bearing the physical and emotional scars of that conflict. Although the underlying warnings about the horrors of war and the perils of blind nationalism will always be relevant, there is an inevitable lack of urgency to the basic narrative that Ozon is never quite able to overcome. For example, one of the most powerful scenes in “Broken Lullaby” arrives when Dr. Hoffmeister, there played by Lionel Barrymore, comes across a group of fellow villagers in the local pub being led in anti-French sentiment by Kreutz. Barrymore's character admonishes them by reminding them that they are just as guilty for the death of their sons as the French soldiers that shot them because they were the ones who unthinkingly sent them off to battle to be slaughtered. In 1932, this scene must have been devastating to audiences of the time; in Ozon’s version, it just comes across as a melodramatic monologue and nothing more.
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