Polish-born/Prague-trained director Agnieszka Holland, still making smart, provocative, accessible films 55 years into her career/35 years after hitting the international circuit with EUROPA EUROPA/’90, finds new angles on Franz Kafka less in content than in execution. It freshens the conversation on this over-analyzed modernist to good effect. Hopscotching around his short life (40 years), Holland’s Kafka (Idan Weiss) grows less neurotic, if more fragile (TB did him in) as the years pass, and with more public success in his lifetime than you may recall. Decently, if unhappily employed; published, even a major literary prize; public readings; no unknown recluse. Plus quite a bit of sex. (What a lot of male nudity in the film.) At home, a sympathetic family with the notable exception of his loud, large, dominating businessman father, always on the edge of financial failure at work or an explosion at the dining table.* All beautifully caught in the film’s physical production. And all relatively standard readings. But Holland’s not only making a bio-pic, but also an Essay Film. So we not only jump around his life span (1883 - 1924), but also into the present day with tour groups & guides talking us thru his work and workplaces. Objects and physical spaces Holland has Franz enter as well, as if he were one of the tourists out to see where the great man lived and worked. It sounds gimmicky, but doesn’t play that way. More like a living tribute. The film isn’t meant to be definitive. It just wants to restart a conversation we thought was no longer going anywhere.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For all his literary influence over the past 100 years, Kafka’s film record is mostly misses. A bit of THE TRIAL at a reading in here with lots of laughs would have been pleased Orson Welles whose film adaptation always made him laugh . . . if no one else. Instead, the most successful Kafka on film is merely ‘Kafkaesque.’ Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES/’00 and Roman Polansky’s THE TENANT/’75 about as close as anyone gets. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/04/werckmeister-harmonies-2000.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *That’s Peter Kurth as the Father, a dead ringer in voice & face for classic Hollywood supporting actor Sig Ruman, a favorite of Ernst Lubitsch & Billy Wilder. (On purpose?)
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