Frantz

François Ozon's Frantz opened in 2016 and won Paula Beer the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Performer at Venice that year. The film also took the César for Best Cinematography (Pascal Marti). Adapted loosely from Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 American film Broken Lullaby (itself adapted from Maurice Rostand's 1925 play L'Homme que j'ai tué) the film consolidated Ozon's late-career period of disciplined chamber-drama work after the broader-tonal experimentation of his 2000s films.

In a small German town just after the First World War, the young Anna (Paula Beer) is grieving for her fiancé Frantz Hoffmeister, killed at the Front. She discovers a French stranger named Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney) laying flowers at Frantz's grave. The film follows the relationship that develops between Anna, Adrien and Frantz's parents (the father played with great restraint by Ernst Stötzner) across a short German-French sequence and a later French postscript. Most of the film is in monochrome, with brief sustained passages of colour at moments of memory or imagination.

Ozon's commitment to a register of restrained period-drama, owing something to Lubitsch but also to Pawlikowski's Ida (which had won the Foreign Film Oscar two years earlier), produced one of the most quietly affecting French historical films of recent years. Pascal Marti's photography is among the year's most distinctive; Niney's central performance, watchful and finally clear-eyed, is one of his most carefully calibrated.