Frantz

Frantz (2016) is a Franco-German post-WWI drama by François Ozon that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Paula Beer and Pierre Niney. Ozon shot the film almost entirely in black and white, with colour bleeding in only during certain scenes — a quiet visual grammar for memory and longing.

Germany, just after the armistice. Anna visits the grave of her fiancé Frantz every day; he died somewhere in France at 23, a violinist who loved Verlaine. Then a young Frenchman named Adrien begins appearing at the same grave with flowers. To the grieving townspeople, his presence is an affront — the enemy, mourning one of their dead. Anna is less certain. She asks him about Frantz, and what he tells her changes the shape of everything she thought she knew.

Ozon reworked Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 film Broken Lullaby, shifting the lens from the French soldier's guilt to the German widow's grief — a subtler and ultimately more ambiguous story. Paula Beer won the Silver Lion for Best Actress at Venice for this role. Stream Frantz (2016) online on iFILM.