Recensioni de* critic*

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

An odyssey to Paris and back, Ozon’s film moves slowly, with tiny twists rather than great reveals, and the characters’ emotions are curiously muted, perhaps forcibly repressed as trifles in comparison to the still-fresh horrors of war.

It is a cunningly crafted fiction, full of visual artifice and narrative sleight-of-hand, that by the end could hardly feel more sincere.

The director never condescends to these people; rather, the film is gentle and delicate, shot mainly in gossamer black-and-white widescreen and in compositions that grant a certain spatial integrity to each character. Ozon respects the emotional sincerity of classic Hollywood melodrama without slavishly imitating it.

In Frantz, Ozon dispenses with the storytelling and political conventions of most gay films—in fact, he teases them in profound ways.

The rare case of a remake that far surpasses the original, this sublime mature work by François Ozon borrows liberally from Ernst Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby (1932) but supplants its fevered melodrama with erotically charged mystery.

As the emotional fulcrum of the film, the deepening ties between Anna and Adrien have the same kind of dull, matte gloss of the black-and-white cinematography — monochrome that occasionally segues to color, an ill-conceived gambit occasioned by flashbacks and fleeting moments of joy.

“Frantz” takes pains to show both sides’ lingering hostility after a devastating and (the movie implies) senseless war.

The black-and-white cinematography of François Ozon's Frantz is gorgeous yet oddly un-evocative, abounding in compositions that are clean, pristine, and unencumbered by the spontaneous emotional textures that draw many of us to cinema. Shadows loom over the nooks and crannies of the images with a carefulness that dispels true tension; certain flourishes are neat rather than poetic.

If, for all its soapy intricacies, Frantz remains a muted and disappointing experience, the blame lies with Ozon's miscalculated direction. He hangs much of the film on the performance of Paula Beer, a young, proficient actress who does not yet transfix the camera in ways that fully exploit Frantz's emotional or psychological potential, especially as Anna's choices and motives grow ever more complex.

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.

Ozon is again stepping out of France to direct a film abroad in a different language. Fortunately, he fares much better this time around with Frantz, a post-WWI black-and-white melodrama dealing with duality, deceit, and distance as fuel for the obfuscating power of the mind. No doubt among the most distinct entries in a filmography as diverse as it is uneven, Ozon's latest is elegantly economical in drawing a portrait of a small German town deeply traumatized by the Great War.