Frantz
- 5 may 2017
- 2 Min. de lectura
War destroys lives. It's something that seems so obvious on the surface, but in times of ascending nationalisms, we shouldn't take it as a global understood fact. In Frantz, a young french man goes to Germany to see the family of a man he knew and died in combat. The ghost of Frantz still haunts the girlfriend that never got to marry him, the parents who encouraged him to join the army as much as it haunts this foreigner. The family gets to know him; he is a talented violin player who loves art and swimming, but for the rest of the German people, he is just a French enemy, one who could have been the killer of the many young men who died in the war just like Frantz.
It is a pacifist film, above all, but it manages to avoid being didactic in order to show us how pathetic are the prejudices we carry on people just because of the place they were born. It is subtle and delicate, the rhythm of the first part is pure poetry, and even if the second part stumbles a bit, it still can show that there's much more story and much more to tell in a history of mending hearts after the biggest loss. The cinematography is fascinating, the elegance of black and white and its transition to color in certain moments shows a great understanding on how to use aesthetic devices to make the narrative stronger. Frantz, along with Dans la Maison, shows us that François Ozon can reach great levels in orchestrating the whole elements and subordinate them to fantastic stories.
Another merit for Ozon is how much he restrains the hate that lies beneath the text. He never recurs to violence or excess to show a society that is rotten by the hatred to foreigners, he just offers brief visual images that express much more than what a battlefield scene could have done; he is specially efficient in the national anthems scenes. Perhaps we all can agree that Germans taking pride in their nationalism led to Nazism, so when in the film we see the Germans chanting the national anthem, we can predict the horrific consequences. But in the contrary, La Marseillaise, the French anthem, is synonym of heroism; but here, when we see a mirror scene of French people singing it, we understand that it is also a call for murder, a call to kill our enemies, forgetting that they are human beings, in order to defend the patriotism, forgetting that it is an intangible concept. Perhaps it's time to change our hymns and start singing to kill our nations in order to defend other human beings.
Comentarios