Seasoned Polish director Agnieszka Holland's biopic of perhaps the most celebrated Czech writer Franz Kafka shares much unconventionality in filmmaking as Peter Watkins' Edvard Munk biopic - with jumbled timeline - Vonnegut style, breaking the 4th wall with protagonists glancing at the camera, etc. Like Watkins's Munk, Holland relies on these dizzying formalist filmmaking - unruly zoom-ins, shallow focuses, to accentuate the craziness of early 20th century hurtling towards world wars and nazi Germany.
In Franz, Kafka (Idan Weiss), is a man of words, writing strange short stories in the household of gregarious industrialist patriarch, Hermann (Peter Kurth). Growing up with 3 sisters and an obedient mother and later, suffering from consumption (which he died of at the age of 40), in many film versions, Kafka is treated as an effeminate and sickly man, a complete outsider who couldn't deal with outside society. Not in Holland's version - here, he is depicted as a well-rounded, vigorous young man who enjoys the company of women, physical exercises and being sociable when he wants to. He even enlisted in WWI in support of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
It's his words on many letter exchanges with women that gets him in trouble. First with Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), whom he was hastily engaged with, then her best friend Grete (Gesa Schermuly) and later, his best friend and publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz)'s wife Milena (Jenovéfa Boková). In many ways, Kafka is depicted as an everyman who happens to be a great writer with a very dark imagination. As a tour guide to Kafka museum in present day explains, Kafka wrote only a handful of short stories and novels but himself is a subject of millions of writings.
But I think Holland's cinematic approach to Kafka's genius was taken for granted too much. The only time we see one of his writings coming to life is Penal Colony in the beginning. It is appropriately shocking and gruesome - an accused is bound on a board face down. And countless beds of needles press down on his bare back to write his crimes on his skin for hours. As Kafka reads giddily in front of live audiences, the half of the crowd, sickened by the story, walk off. I just wished she used more of his writing imagined on screen, throughout the film.
With a kaleidoscopic depiction of the life of the famous literary figure, what Holland is trying to get at with Franz, is that it is impossible to present someone truthfully. It is true that Holland's Kafka is not a caricature of the famous writer but more of a person, but in doing so misses the mystique about the man who was one of the most influential writers of all time.
