General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Frantz

Frantz is a 2016 drama film directed by François Ozon, a French and German co-production set in Germany and France in the aftermath of the First World War. It follows Anna (Paula Beer), a young German woman mourning her fiancé Frantz, who was killed in the trenches in France, and Adrien (Pierre Niney), a mysterious young Frenchman who appears at Frantz's grave to lay flowers. The film is shot mostly in black and white, with occasional scenes in color, and is a loose adaptation of Maurice Rostand's postwar play L'Homme que j'ai tué, which Ernst Lubitsch had already filmed as Broken Lullaby.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	François Ozon, screenplay with Philippe Piazzo; loosely based on Rostand's play and Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby¹
Countries and languages	France and Germany; filmed in French and German¹
Lead cast	Pierre Niney as Adrien Rivoire, Paula Beer as Anna, Ernst Stötzner, Marie Gruber, Anton von Lucke as Frantz¹
Visual style	Mostly black and white on 35mm (cinematography Pascal Marti), with selected scenes in color³
Release	French theatrical release 7 September 2016; United States release 15 March 2017⁴^•²
Running time	113 minutes (114 min per the French CNC visa record)¹^•⁴
Reception	Metascore 73 from 28 critic reviews (21 positive, 7 mixed, 0 negative); IMDb rating 7.5/10 from about 19,000 ratings⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Story and premise

The action begins in 1919 in a small German town, where the wounds of the war are still raw. Anna, living with Frantz's parents, the Hoffmeisters, visits her fiancé's grave daily. One day she finds fresh flowers already there, laid by Adrien, a French veteran. His presence in a defeated, war-battered community ignites hostility, but Anna draws him out about his pre-war friendship with Frantz in Paris, and the two grow close. Adrien's story holds further revelations that the film protects and then peels away, and the account of the lost generation struggling after the war takes unexpected turns.⁷^•⁸

Ozon framed the film around secrecy rather than guilt. In the play and in Lubitsch's film, the Frenchman's secret is known to the audience from the beginning, after a confession scene with a priest; Ozon instead wanted the audience, like Anna, not to know why this Frenchman is mourning at her fiancé's grave, telling the story from the point of view of the young woman on the losing side of the war.⁹

Origins and adaptation

Ozon's starting point was a play by Maurice Rostand written just after the First World War, about a young Frenchman who lays roses on the grave of a German soldier. While developing the script he learned that the story had already been adapted for the screen in 1931 by Ernst Lubitsch under the title Broken Lullaby, a film that was a box-office failure at the time and is Lubitsch's least-known work and his only drama. Ozon's first reaction was to abandon the project; watching Lubitsch's film reassured him, because its point of view, that of the young Frenchman, differed from the one he wanted.⁹^•¹⁰

The perspective is the central difference between the two versions. Lubitsch, a Berlin-born director who could not know a second world war was coming, made an optimistic film of reconciliation in the pacifist climate of the era. Ozon, a Frenchman who experienced neither war, told the story from the German side, through Anna, and included several of Lubitsch's scenes in homage.⁹^•¹¹ Commentators on Ozon's career describe his approach to source texts as loose reinterpretation rather than remake, with Lubitsch's film and Rostand's play serving as sources of inspiration for his own narrative.¹²

Ozon also connected the material to his own present. He wrote the script shortly after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, and developed the nationalist currents in the story, on both the German and the French side, with that context in mind. A café scene in which characters sing La Marseillaise was written, he said, to let a French audience hear the song from the point of view of the German girl, with the violence of its lyrics in the context of the war.¹³

Style

The film was originally planned in color. About a month before shooting began, Ozon changed the plan: after location scouting in Germany he found the places too colorful, as if in a Walt Disney village, and photographs of the town in black and white from the beginning of the century convinced him that monochrome would look more realistic. Because he also loves color, he kept selected scenes in color, moments that hint at the happiness of the past or hope of the future against the black-and-white reality in which everyone mourns at least one loved one.³^•⁷

The decision carried a professional cost he had to argue for: French films receive substantial television funding, and a black-and-white film mostly in German would not be shown in prime time.³ Pascal Marti's 35mm cinematography, with its influence of 1930s and 1940s Classic Hollywood technique, gives the film the look of a classic from a bygone age, and reviewers noted the stylistic comparison with Michael Haneke's black-and-white The White Ribbon, while observing that Ozon's dramatic intentions differ.¹³^•¹⁴ Production designer Michel Barthélémy drew inspiration for the settings from paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershøi, Roman Polanski's Tess, and Lubitsch's original for the romantic scenes.¹⁵

Reception and awards

Frantz premiered in competition at the 73rd Venice Film Festival in 2016 and later screened at Toronto, San Sebastián, London, and Sundance, among other festivals.¹⁰^•⁸ Paula Beer won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress at Venice 2016, and reviewers singled out her performance as the film's biggest strength.²^•⁷

Critical response was generally favorable. On Metacritic the film holds a Metascore of 73 based on 28 critic reviews, 21 positive and 7 mixed with none negative; Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle called it one of Ozon's best films, while the most negative review collected, from CineVue, called it an underwhelming tale whose sheen belied an emptiness at its heart.⁵ On IMDb the film rates 7.5/10 from about 19,000 user ratings.⁶

The film's awards include Best Cinematography for Pascal Marti at the 42nd César Awards, Top Foreign Film at the 2017 National Board of Review, and the Director's Choice Award for Best Foreign Feature Film for Ozon; it received 1 win and 11 nominations at the César Awards overall, and was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice.²^•¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2015 and 2016 › Released in 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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