Bizarre Love Triangle

FRANTZ (B) - Not bad for a prim post-Verdun romantic drama.

It doesn't seem sufficient to call Francois Ozon a writer-director or a filmmaker. He is a master storyteller. He takes just about any story -- whether he wrote it himself or whether, like here, he is adapting another's work -- and makes it riveting. And his simple visual style never gets in the way of that story.

Here, Ozon ("Under the Sand," "The New Girlfriend," "Young & Beautiful") travels back to the days after World War I, in crisp black and white, to unravel the story of Frantz, a German soldier seen in flashbacks who died during the war, and his widowed fiancee, Anna (Paula Beer), who is still close to Frantz's parents. (He is adapting a story told by Ernst Lubitsch in 1932, based on a stage play.)

One day, Anna discovers a man putting flowers on Frantz's grave. It turns out to be Adrien (Pierre Niney), a gawky, glum French veteran. To the irritation of the locals, Anna befriends Adrien and even falls for him.

The "mystery" here -- and it isn't intended to be much of one -- involves the question of how Adrien knew Frantz and why he travels to Germany to pay tribute to his former battlefield enemy. I'll give you two guesses, and the first one is too far-fetched to contemplate logistically, unless you know Ozon's work, and then you think ... well, maybe.

There is a loveliness and a dourness to the storytelling here. There are occasional splashes of color, including in several war scenes, as if to shock the senses with the vividness of life. The actress Beer is wonderfully sedate. Niney has a hangdog John Hawkes manner to him. And their awkward interactions feel natural and lived in.

It all unfolds over nearly two hours, but it never drags. It has two neat halves -- the introduction and innocent quasi-courtship, and Anna's trip to France to solve the mystery of Adrien and his background. It has echoes to some of Ozon's best work -- the riddle and detective work by Charlotte Rampling in "Under the Sand"; the dignified end-of-life maleness of "Time to Leave."

Even when he's borrowing a script and working in a minor key, Ozon finds humanity and beauty, refining it as if it's his own.

BONUS TRACKS
Our title track, from New Order, of course:



The trailer: