French art-house helmer François Ozon (In The House) directs Paula Beer and Pierre Niney in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's...
French art-house helmer François Ozon (In The House) directs Paula Beer and Pierre Niney in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 WWI drama, Broken Lullaby.
"Spying a stranger laying a bouquet of roses on her beloved fiancé's grave one day, the quietly grieving Anna (Beer) is both surprised and intrigued. The war has just ended. Anna was engaged to Frantz, who was killed, and the people in her German home town are just beginning to emerge from the shadow of horrendous conflict. Frantz's parents are shattered over their son's death.
"Tentatively, the stranger reveals his identity: he is French, and with the war so raw in everyone's minds, he is clearly not welcome in this small community. Yet it emerges that Adrien (Niney) knew Frantz in the pre-war period, when the two of them became fast friends over their shared love of art and, in particular, music. Anna, along with Frantz's parents, eventually warms to this sensitive Frenchman, who simply wanted to visit the gravesite of his dead friend. But this is only the beginning of a story whose twists and turns take us down emotionally haunting avenues." (Toronto International Film Festival)
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Where to watch Frantz
91 %139 reviewsRotten Tomatoes® rating
85 %2,894 reviewsAudience score rating
"Love, loss, and war. It’d take you less than a minute of googling to find five masterful films that already cover those themes. It’s much harder to find a new film that can spin those ideas into a different ball of yarn. This is where Frantz surprises; it takes a seemingly standard post-war story and twists expectations – slightly but frequently – in order to find a fresh truth about what war, love and loss do to us."
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Flicks
Flicks"The results are oddly more artificial than the 1932 original ['Broken Lullaby'], and considerably less moving."
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Variety
Variety"Slightly over-polite, but the sense of festering postwar anger and pain is strong."
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Time Out
Time Out"As if shedding a skin, the film shucks off its elegiac, white-gloved manners to explore a slippery realm of secrets, lies and moral uncertainty that eventually leads her to consult a priest for advice on how to proceed."
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The New York Times
The New York Times"Ozon is often at his best when working with women, and he has a fabulous talent in Paula Beer to bring his protagonist, Anna, to vivid life. She's stunning in the role."
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The Guardian
The Guardian"Francois Ozon's post-WW1 period piece about a German widow and a French solder takes on xenophobic hatred that's as timely as Trump, making Frantz is a film of its time ... and ours."
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Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone"More than once, "Frantz" hints that it will reveal itself as a homoerotic reworking of "Broken Lullaby." But Ozon has something simpler and no less intriguing up his sleeve"
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Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times"[Ozon's] story is one that's subtler and digs deeper while it keeps exploring how both political and personal questions are dealt with within a moral framework and how that framework itself is also open to interpretation."
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Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood ReporterFrantz | Details
Award winner- Winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress (Beer), 2016 Venice Film Festival.
- Runtime
- 113
- Genre
- Drama, War
- Country of origin
- France, Germany
