Three Movies About Love: ‘Frantz’, ‘Call Me By Your Name’ and ‘On Body and Love’
Three great movies, all about love — and not only about love — will be entering the theatrical arena soon and if you are craving some love, you want to see these.
“Frantz” directed by Francois Ozon. U.S. Release March 24 by Music Box. International sales by Films Distribution.
About to be released March 24 by Music Box, “Frantz” premiered in Venice and Toronto Film Festivals this last fall. Boyd van Hoeij’s review in The Hollywood Reporter is the recommended review for those who like to read reviews in advance. He describes “Frantz” as “a richly imagined and superbly assembled period piece”. The L.A. Goethe Institute had a sneak preview and I was among the lucky who got to see it there.
Inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s “Broken Lullaby”, in German and French, B&W and in color “Frantz” not just a surprise, as Ozon likes to present to his audiences, but it is also a well-developed work of art and at the same time the most heartening call for peace that I can recall in a movie. As the small German town’s physician, whose son was killed in the just passed Great War says to the other fathers that meet nightly for a beer and who have all lost their sons in the war, We the fathers are sending our sons off to war. We are responsible for their deaths, not the French whose fathers are doing the very same thing with their sons. We are to blame.
In this man-made world of ours beset by strife among nations as it is today, this call for pacifism brings up the second most important argument against war and men bearing arms to kill one another. It is the men who are sending their sons and now their daughters into these ghastly circumstances to die or be damaged for life. (The first argument is that it is enslavement to governments, which falsely purport to be for the people.)
When a young Frenchman comes to the staunchly German town to visit the grave of the doctor’s son, Frantz, in the spring after the Great War’s end, Frantz’s twenty-four year old grieving fiancée sees the handsome stranger and the story begins. When he meets the family of his German counterpart, they assume he knew his son in their peaceful days as students in Paris and they take him into their hearts. The love story engrosses, surprises and warms your soul while (to quote van Hoeij again) the “pacifist message of outreach across cultures, languages and ideologies resonate[s] in post-Brexit Europe and anywhere — cough — where polarized politics seem designed to drive a rift between people(s).”
This film goes far beyond what I see as Ozon’s “glib” films and it goes far beyond his usual concerns. There are the Ozonian twists as the director reaches an apex of great storytelling. The end result: Love. And Art. See this one and you will feel renewed in spirit.
Coming this spring, March 24, in a limited release, brought to you by Music Box, this film is being represented internationally by Films Distribution and will show theatrically throughout Europe, Turkey, Latin America, South Korea and Japan. Potential for the next Best Foreign Language Oscar.
“Call Me By Your Name” directed by Luca Guadagnino. US release November 2017 by Sony Pictures Classis. International sales by Memento Films International.
The next deeply moving and drop-dead gorgeous film premiered at Sundance and was the critic’s darling. “Call Me By Your Name” took ten years to be produced by our local son, Howard Rosenman.
Quoted by Ashley Lee in The Hollywood Reporter, February 8, 2017, in response to her question,
“Were you surprised by the overwhelmingly positive Sundance reaction to ‘Call Me by Your Name’?
Guadagnino responded, “Of course! I knew that Sundance was a warm environment for this movie because when we showed “I Am Love”, I felt the Sundance audience was unbiased, uncynical and very open. We only submitted to Sundance and Berlin; I never thought of going beyond the winter festivals, and I’m glad they both picked the film.
I’m one of those directors who read reviews, even if they’re bad, because I started as a film critic as a cinema student. I indulge in the art of criticism in general. In this case, what I found beautiful and inspiring was the way the writers found ways to describe this movie that are not formatted to its typical description. I feel this love for the movie very strongly.
I went to see Luca Guadagnino’s sublime “Call Me By Your Name” because I loved the director’s first film, “I Am Love” starring Tilda Swinton, for its deep spirit and gorgeous Italian urban sophistication — its décor, overall ambiance and emotional heft. “Call Me By Your Name” captures a similar lush Italian atmosphere, but here it is the countryside in Northern Italy, reminiscent of “The Garden of Finzi Contini” in its elegance. Surprising to me (I had read no program notes) was that it was a deeply moving coming of age love story between a super bright Jewish seventeen year old (Timothee Chalamet who played Dana Brody’s boyfriend on “Homeland”and Matthew McConaughey’s son in “Interstellar”) and his archeologist father’s research assistant (also Jewish) played by Armie Hammer, in early-’80s Italy. I wondered why the family, both parents — the Italian mother and the American father — were Jewish and noticed that the producer Howard Rosenman was Jewish as well. Perhaps it was his idea — no, as I read the liner notes I saw it was based on the novel by Andre Aciman, a Jewish writer expelled from Egypt in the 1960s who now teaches at Harvard and is a master Proustian. So while this detail is not really relevant to the story any more than the detail that a neighbor has a portrait of Mussolini still hanging prominently in her house, still, every detail makes for a connection between the audience and the work of art. (Perhaps the reader will guess that I too happen to be Jewish). This is, in fact, an idealistic portrayal of the most wonderful possible summer for two young and beautiful men living within the embrace of a wonderful loving family in a beautiful idyllic Italian villa. And how it resonates!
Andre Aciman’s acclaimed novel, about a 24-year-old American’s summer romance with a 17-year-old boy on the Italian Riviera in 1983, tells a universal story about family and first love. Sony Pictures Classics smartly grabbed the film before its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. This has the potential for being the next Best Foreign Language Oscar.
Luca Guadagnino’s sublime “Call Me By Your Name” will be released in the U.S. in November over the Thanksgiving Holiday by Sony Pictures Classics.
“On Body and Soul” directed by Ildikó Enyedi. No U.S. distributor. International sales by Films Boutique.
The third stunner of a love story is the Golden Bear Winner of the Berlinale, “On Body and Soul”. It transported us completely out of all the worrisome cares of the day, even more than “La La Land” which was also pretty exceptional escapist fare. This film also could be the next Best Foreign Language Oscar. While it has sold widely, there have been no reports of a U.S. distribution deal
The Hungarians are making the movie news, this film is totally different from 2015’s Oscar winner “Son of Saul”, or from the sleeper of Berlin, “1945”, said by some to be a masterpiece as well.
Ildikó Enyedi’s “On Body and Soul”/ “Testről és lélekről” won the Golden Bear Award for Best Picture in Competition at the Berlinale as well as the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI juries’ prizes for best film in the Official Competition and the Berliner Morgenpost Readers’ Award.
Director Enyedi, who lives in both Hungary and Germany, began her career as a conceptual artist and made her premiere at Cannes in 1989 with “My Twentieth Century,” which won the festival’s Camera d’Or. She has released five feature films since, including “On Body and Soul”.
Before announcing the winner of the golden statuette, jury president Paul Verhoeven told the audience that they would be seeing ¨two people connected in quite an amazing way. The jury fell in love with this movie not only because of its superior craftsmanship, but because it reminds us of one word we use too easily: compassion.¨
This is a gorgeously told story of love brings light and happiness to our souls and allows us to feel, in respect to our own bodies, as if we have been transported to paradise.
A slaughterhouse in Budapest is the setting of a strangely beautiful love story. No sooner does Mária start work as the new quality controller than the whispers begin. At lunch the young woman always chooses a table on her own in the sterile canteen where she sits in silence. She takes her job seriously and adheres strictly to the rules, deducting penalty points for every excessive ounce of fat. Hers is a world that consists of figures and data that have imprinted themselves on her memory since early childhood. This story of two people discovering the realm of emotions and physical desire, at first individually and then together, is tenderly told by director Ildikó Enyedi, but in a way that also exudes subtle humor. A film about the fears and inhibitions associated with opening up to others, and about how exhilarating it can be when you finally do.
¨We wanted to present you a very simple film like a glass of water,¨ Enyedi explained. ¨It was risky, all of my team believed in it, but we couldn’t know if the audience would join us because this film is only approchable with a generous heart.¨
Ildikó Enyedi holding her Golden Bear for “On Body and Soul”
Three films with three messages of love, thanks go to the Lumiere Brothers for inventing the movies!
