Tuesday, March 26, 4:00 pm, Popp-Martin Student Union Theater
(Building 69 on this map; closest parking is Union Deck)
Tuesday, April 2, 2:30pm, College of Education Building 010
(Building 52 on this map; closest parking is Union Deck)
Drama by François Ozon, France/Germany 2016 / 113 min.
French and German with English subtitles
Presented as part of The Tournées Festival, made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the French American Cultural Fund, Florence Gould Foundation and Highbrow Entertainment.
Additional sponsors are the Alliance Française de Charlotte and the UNC Charlotte French Club.
Introduction by Mary LaMarca, Lecturer of French, UNC Charlotte. A discussion will follow the screening.
Shortly after World War I, in a provincial German town conspicuously devoid
of its young men, Anna discovers a stranger at the grave of her late fiancé
Frantz, one of the thousands of young Germans killed in the war. The stranger
soon introduces himself to Anna and Frantz’s parents as Adrien, a French
friend of the dead soldier. Growing fond of Adrien, Anna begins to come out of
mourning for Frantz and once again embraces her future. Then Adrien makes
a terrible confession and disappears, forcing Anna to go searching for him
in Paris. With this stirring adaptation of Ernst Lubistch’s classic melodrama
Broken Lullaby, François Ozon, a master of cinematic dissemblance, delivers
a sumptuous period piece that asks whether a lie can ever be healthier than
the truth. Coming at a time when the European Union appears at its most
vulnerable, Frantz is also a meditation on Europe: Anna’s journey to France
mirrors Adrien’s to Germany, bridging the bloody differences between the
two nations in 1919 to show how much they have in common—as well as the
nagging strains of nationalism and xenophobia. But this lush romance filmed
in black and white and color is above all a profoundly unusual and effective
pacifist film, which—aside from one brief but devastating flashback—takes
place entirely after the war, surveying the human damage both on the winning
and the losing sides.
