Veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland whose films have been nominated three times in the Best Foreign Language film category, namely ‘Angry Harvest’ (1985), ‘Europa, Europa’ (1990), and ‘In Darkness’ (2011), has finally realized her decades long dream project about the enigmatic literary giant, Franz Kafka, in her latest Academy Awards contender, ‘Franz’.
The celebrated international filmmaker shares her unique version of Kafka in a biopic that deviates from a straight narrative format by juxtaposing dream and reality, past and present, with referential literary works and journal entries by the Czech author himself. Director Holland has been a great admirer of Kafka’s work since she was a teenager and has even made ‘The Trial’ for television at the beginning of her career. It has become a passion of hers to absorb everything Kafka has written which wouldn’t have been possible had they all been burnt as per the author’s instructions before he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. If not for the friend and literary executor Max Brod, who refused to fulfill Kafka’s last wish, the world would never have been introduced to the nightmarish vision and labyrinthian puzzle that came to be known as ‘Kafkaesque’.
For Ms. Holland, the course she has taken in filming Kafka is not conventionally designed as a linear biopic exposition. Be that as it may, the trajectory of the film goes off the rails with its large dose of humdrum scenes of domestic squabbles. The sluggish tempo is sustained throughout the movie only to sparingly jolt the viewer veering towards somnolence with intermittent scenes of surprises like Kafka’s father squashing a listless roach wandering on the dinner table, or Kafka bursting into uncontrollable laughter in front of his befuddled superiors at the office. This erratic appearance of scenes and images attributed to the director and screenwriter’s understanding of Kafka’s quirkiness and idiosyncrasies pull the viewer’s attention back to Ms. Holland’s intention which is to breathe life to Kafka’s persona beyond the mystique created by his fame.
But the tendency to even encapsulate the kitsch surrounding modern Prague’s commercialization of their literary hero detracts from what could have been the focal point of deconstructing Kafka. It diminishes the back story of who the creator of those novellas, short stories, and parables really is, as a son, brother, friend and fiancé. Showing the lighter side with his brand of humour to capture his humanity behind those bleak pages he wrote is not enough to pull heartstrings of either the ‘Kafkaficionado’ or the novice at Kafka’s world of despair.
Kafka’s astonishing body of salvaged work and singular contribution to literature, drama, and cinema must have enkindled varying degrees of inspiration amongst artists in all mediums of expression. For one, Steven Soderbergh’s mystery-thriller ‘Kafka’ in 1991 created the atmosphere that certainly reflected the ‘Kafkaesque’ in blurring boundaries between the author’s reality and the themes of his literary works. Chris Swanton’s “Metamorphosis”, a 2012 feature adaptation of the iconic novella captures the transformation of the protagonist Gregor and his tragic predicament that evokes the anguish true to the soul of Kafka’s creation.
Ms. Holland’s experimentation with a material she has pored over for years seems stymied in contrast to earlier adaptations by other filmmakers on the subject where the mood is clearly set from the very beginning til the end with so many dreamlike images attributable to Kafka and befitting the genre he had pioneered.
The inclusion or compensatory insertion of shocking violence from a torture sequence drawn from the story, “In The Penal Colony” does not make for a seamless transition to other selected biographical information about the author either. It does not sit well if only to underscore Kafka’s dark world. It is as if it was extracted apart from all the other more emblematic Kafkian stories to make it stand out or suggest that the author had premonition of concentration camp horror of decimating Jewish communities by ingenious acts of barbarity. Medieval history and literature on man’s inhumanity using torture chambers as punishment are more than enough to kickstart the imagination of someone whose propensity towards the macabre is well known. To say that it was written as a foreshadowing of the holocaust is panacea to the whole anemic structure. It might have been particularly added to break the monotony or offset the ‘torturous’ boredom of the whole film.
Franz’s isolation and slipping into a vortex of worthlessness is mirrored in the biopic by Ms. Holland, but because of her conscious avoidance of cliches, much of what is characteristically ‘Kafkaesque’ is deliberately diffused if not excluded. The strained relationship between father and son in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” cannot be overlooked as almost identical to the real Kafkas. Any attempt to equally portray the intense alienation suffered by the author fails to dramatize what was already laid out in those slither-marked pages. This might be the entrapment of paying homage to a genius like Kafka where putting one’s own stamp can go awry.
Though she has found a gem of an actor’s uncanny resemblance to the photographed image of Kafka, no amount of timidity and irrational behaviour displays from acting performance can harness a strong empathy for the protagonist. The character’s complexity based on his life and work is already a given in the personhood of Kafka and by the complicated turnaround to combobulate a fresher version of him comes out somewhat ‘deKafkanated’ so to speak. ####