As biopic subjects progress, Franz Kafka is resistant to standard problem treatment at many levels. His life was not particularly surprising due to the short and little known fact of the time. A humble civil servant in a middle-class Czech Jewish family in Prague, he published little of his influential literature work before his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40. While he was alive, his presence resembles the presence of many frustrating Moonlight writers. There is also the issue of spiritual loyalty in people and his works. For artists associated with nightmarely distorted reality and absurdity, linear, shiny, authoritative WikiMoby is a kind of betrayal.
This is not a fee that can be levelled by veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland. Her roving, calming portrait “Franz,” praises Kafka’s symbolism, if not his literary sensibility. It is filled with skipping the era and ramping damage to the fourth wall. That’s not a problem in itself, especially since Stephen Soderbergh has already made that approach with his own anti-biopic “Kafka.” The thin curated egg, a gorgeous curated egg, passed on a thin thread into the writer’s dark, delusional fictional noir striped pastiche.
Holland’s films contain only relatively orthodox things, but also the essentials of the cradle-to-grave biographies, but fragmented not only between Kafka’s childhood and his adult neurosis, but also between his socioeconomic commentary and our corporateized current target, but also into a rattle-like kaleidoscopic structure that forgets connections.
But in all of this enthusiastic darts and pointing, “Franz” also has no greater angle view at Kafka, beyond the general declaration of his enduring importance. The Holland movie has a much more formal idea, with shots and designs in Verve than the average great guy’s biopic. Every few minutes, it appears to be trying out a new style of tack every few minutes between the hybrid crash zoom and the signal of the intensely destructive soundtrack. The character commentes on the direct progression to the camera at one point and retreats to the stable distance of another person’s historic drama.
But intellectually, “Franz’s” idea is thinning on the ground. While Kafka’s film portrayal as a misunderstood genius stunned by the bourgeois capitalist priorities is not sympathetic, his involvement with his actual work is limited, given, or given in the script by Marek Epstein. (Early, Holland settles for dull, Jokey’s references when cockroaches are angered and flattened by Kafka’s father in a tense dinner table scene.) Only in one standout sequence, it appears that the candidates for that film are fully imagined, with the crosscut between his short story “Prison Colony” and the dreamy, creepy dramatization.
Despite the elaborate and disorderly presentation, the film’s simpler biopic material contains little surprise. We have repeated attempts to escape the boring work of his insurance office, through his lovely writings by his rude and business-oriented father (Peter Carse), his mother (Sandra Kolzeniak), particularly his close relationship with his devoted sister Ottora (Katherina Stark), his engagement to the marriage of a working-class German woman (Carol Scholar), his engagement with her Best Friend Affair Away Archive (Katherina Stark), or through his unsuccessful attempts to join the Army during World War I.
Big screen rookie Idan Weiss is needed to reinforce the different floating parts of the film, with his stoic, haunted presence. (He is also, by coincidence, a Ringer near Pierre Ninny, the star of the film “Frantz,” a film from the completely unrelated period of French actor Pierre Ninny. Kafka’s dysfunctional relationship with his father has been consistent for decades, perhaps highlighted by the fact that there is too much vignette between the roots of trauma and the twins of roosts.
“Franz” is most interesting when reaching outside the lifespan of the subject, in order to bridge Kafka’s modest presence and fill in his impression of today. Moving Coda dramatically portrays the risks his friend and colleague Max Brod (Sebastian Schwartz) took to maintain and protect Kafka’s writings after his death, even at the rise of anti-intellectual fascism in the 1930s.
However, the cutaway, repeated on current tours in an exaggerated interpretation of the Kafka Museum of Prague’s real life, takes a strange note. There is some wisdom in their portrayal of how Kafka’s personal and creative struggles are vulnerable to romanticization by educators, curators and, in fact, filmmakers. But the sour Strowman swipe in the tourism industry, which packages his name into the literal “Kafka Burgers” feels like a base. To propose “Franz” with freedom of gimmicks and a wealth of historical name checks, we sell short Dutch artistry and curiosity, but the cuff cover gar itself is at least like a chopped cuff salad.
