Frantz

Frantz is a 2016 drama film directed and co-written by François Ozon and starring Paula Beer and Pierre Niney. It is about a young German woman whose fiancé has been killed in World War I and the French soldier who comes bearing a secret about her fiancé. It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival, where Beer won the Marcello Mastroianni Award. At the 42nd César Awards, Frantz was nominated in eleven categories, winning one for Best Cinematography. Frantz is a loose adaptation of the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch film Broken Lullaby, which in turn was based on Maurice Rostand's 1930 French play L'homme que j'ai tué. Plot In Quedlinburg, Germany, in 1919, Anna, a young German woman (Paula Beer) grieving over the death of her fiancé, Frantz Hoffmeister, in World War I, leaves flowers at his grave. She sees there fresh ones and realizes that these are from Adrien (Pierre Niney), a young Frenchman she doesn't know. Adrien goes to the home of Frantz's parents, Dr. Hans and Magda Hoffmeister, but when Hans hears that Adrien is French, he tells him that a Frenchman killed his son, blames all French as murderers, and orders Adrien away, to which Adrien merely admits to Hans "You are right. I am a murderer". Meanwhile, Anna is rejecting the unwelcome advances of an older suitor Mr. Kreutz, particularly as she cannot forget Frantz. Anna sees Adrien at the grave and sends him an invitation to the Hoffmeister home. After she tells the Hoffmeisters that Adrien was leaving flowers at Frantz's grave, they relent. Adrien visits and, upon questioning, tell them that he and Frantz were students together in Paris before the war. He recounts their last day together, when they visited the Louvre. Anna takes Adrien to the places she and Frantz used to go together, including the mountaintop where he proposed to her. Adrien, whose demeanour reminds them of Frantz, lifts Anna and the Hoffmeisters out of their despair. The Hoffmeisters ask Adrien, who had been a violinist, but whose hearing was damaged in the war, to play Frantz's violin for them, as Frantz used to do. Adrien asks Anna to go to the local ball with him and she accepts. The appearance of a Frenchman at the ball draws negative reactions from the locals, especially Kreutz.