Francois Ozon's Frantz (2016)

 The exception to this rule about remaking Lubitsch is Frantz, the movingly restrained 2016 film by French director Francois Ozon.  Frantz improves on one of Lubitsch's rare misfires, The Man I Killed (Broken Lullaby), by dispensing with its overwrought theatrics and rethinking the storyline, telling it from the viewpoint of the female character and not giving away the reason for the male character's trauma at the beginning.

-- Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Ozon's film is a period piece by a French director, while Lubitsch was born in Germany to Russian Jews in 1892 and did not have to serve in the Great War because he was a Russian citizen.  Both Lubitsch's film, from 1932, and Ozon's film are based on Maurice Rostand's play The Man I Killed, though Ozon's film has a more complicated ending.  In Ozon's film a Frenchman comes to Germany after the end of WWI and Anna sees him leaving flowers at her fiance's grave.  Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney) says he had been friends with Anna's (Paula Beer) betrothed in Paris and Anna brings him home to meet Frantz's parents.  Anna and Adrien become attracted to each other until Adrien eventually confesses that he had killed Frantz in the war and tells her to inform her parents, which she does not do; her parents had practically adopted Adrien and when he leaves for France her parents send Anna off to find him.  She does find him but says it is "too late" for them when she finds out he is to marry someone else.  Anna goes back to Paris to look at a Manet painting that Adrien has claimed to see with Frantz and starts talking to a man who is also looking at the painting.

Ozon's film is more romantic and less pacifist than Lubitsch's, though Anna's father does tell his drinking buddies that it is their fault for sending their children off to war.  The film moves slowly and gracefully as Anna and Adrien gradually get to know each other; the lovely cinematography is in widescreen black-and-white, with occasional scenes (mainly flashbacks and fantasies) in color; the exquisite photography is by Pascal Marti.