“Frantz” returns to Sedona by popular demand after winning the Directors’ Choice Award for Best Foreign Film at the recent Sedona International Film Festival. It also received raved audience reviews and was the third highest rated film in the festival lineup by audience votes.
“Frantz” — by acclaimed director Francois Ozon — is a haunting tale of love and reconciliation begins in a small town in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War I when a young woman mourning the death of her fiancé encounters a mysterious Frenchman laying flowers on her beloved’s grave.
The film recalls the mourning period that follows great national tragedies as seen through the eyes of the war’s “lost generation”: Anna (21 year-old Paula Beer in a breakthrough performance), a bereft young German woman whose fiancé, Frantz, was killed during trench warfare, and Adrien (Pierre Niney), a French veteran of the war who shows up mysteriously in her town, placing flowers on Frantz’s grave.
Adrien's presence is met with resistance by the small community still reeling from Germany’s defeat, yet Anna gradually gets closer to the handsome and melancholy young man, as she learns of his deep friendship with Frantz, conjured up in evocative flashbacks.
What follows is a surprising exploration of how Ozon's characters wrestle with their conflicting feelings — survivor’s guilt, anger at one’s losses, the overriding desire for happiness despite everything that has come before, and the longing for sexual, romantic and familial attachments.