Frantz is one of two films of Francois Ozon, together with ‘Double Lover’, which were premiered last year. If the latter one is characterized by the director’s trademark baroque and grotesque atmosphere, ‘Frantz’ is a rather minute and modest tale in which to find emotion you have to read between the lines. Its protagonist, the young widow Anna (played by Paula Beer who was awarded at the IFF in Venice for her role), meets a stranger at her husband’s grave who died on the frontline. The man says that he was a friend of the deceased husband. The encounter becomes the start of an emotionally complicated relationship between a German woman and a French man hollowed by the past. During the lesson of history in a nutshell, the director asks universal questions about our moral limits and the sense of social and political divides. Frantz is also Ozon’s aesthetic firework - the costumes and scenography captured in black and white cadres by Pascal Marti (who was awarded the Cesar prize for them), are a great reflection of the climate of Germany in the 1920s.