{"id":159129,"date":"2025-09-21T11:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T11:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/159129\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T11:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T11:39:10","slug":"agnieszka-hollands-wildly-scattered-kafka-biopic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/159129\/","title":{"rendered":"Agnieszka Holland’s Wildly Scattered Kafka Biopic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs biopic subjects go, Franz<\/a> Kafka is resistant to standard-issue treatment on a number of levels \u2014 beginning with the fact that his life, short and largely uncelebrated in its time, wasn\u2019t especially remarkable. A humble civil servant from a middle-class Czech Jewish family in Prague, he published very little of his influential literary oeuvre prior to his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40; while he was alive, his existence resembled that of many a frustrated, moonlighting writer stuck in an uninspiring day job. There\u2019s also the matter of spiritual fidelity to the man and his work: For an artist associated with nightmarishly distorted reality and absurdism, a linear, glossily prestigious Wikimovie would amount to a kind of betrayal. <\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s not a charge you can level at veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland<\/a>. Her roving, restlessly shape-shifting portrait \u201cFranz\u201d certainly honors Kafka\u2019s iconoclasm, if not really his literary sensibility: Awash with era-skipping anachronisms and rampant fourth-wall breakage, it\u2019s too puckish, at times even winkingly so, for anyone to describe as Kafkaesque. That\u2019s not in itself a problem, not least since Steven Soderbergh already took that approach in his own anti-biopic \u201cKafka,\u201d a gorgeous curate\u2019s egg that channeled thin strands of fact into a noir-streaked pastiche of the writer\u2019s darkly paranoid fiction. <\/p>\n

\n\tOnly comparatively orthodox, Holland\u2019s film includes cradle-to-grave biographical essentials, but fragmented into a rattling kaleidoscope structure that forges connections not just between Kafka\u2019s childhood and his adult neuroses, but the targets of his socioeconomic commentary and our corporatized present.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet for all this fevered darting and pointing, \u201cFranz\u201d doesn\u2019t have much of a point of view, nor much of an angle on Kafka beyond a general pronouncement of his enduring significance. Shot and designed with verve, Holland\u2019s film has significantly more formal ideas than the average great-man biopic, seemingly trying a new stylistic tack every few minutes, between sundry crash zooms and blaringly disruptive soundtrack cues. Characters archly comment on proceedings directly to camera at some points and retreat into the staid distance of historical drama at others, as passages of seemingly earnest melodrama crash abruptly into broad-brush contemporary satire.<\/p>\n

\n\tIntellectually, however, \u201cFranz\u2019s\u201d ideas are thinner on the ground. The film\u2019s portrayal of Kafka as a misunderstood genius stymied by bourgeois capitalist priorities is sympathetic but hardly radical, while its engagement with his actual work is limited, give or take some canny quotation in Marek Epstein\u2019s script. (Elsewhere, Holland settles for blunt, jokey referencing, as when a cockroach is angrily flattened by Kafka\u2019s father during a tense dinner table scene.) Only in one standout sequence, cross-cutting between an ill-received public reading of his short story \u201cIn the Penal Colony\u201d and a dreamily macabre dramatization of its contents, does the film seem to fully tap its subject\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

\n\tNotwithstanding its elaborately disordered presentation, the film\u2019s more straightforwardly biographical material contains few surprises. We skim through Kafka\u2019s loveless upbringing by his brusque, business-minded father (Peter Kurth), his closer relationships with his mother (Sandra Korzeniak) and his especially devoted sister Ottla (Katharina Stark), his aborted engagement to working-class German woman Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), his rash affair with her best friend Grete Bloch (Gesa Schermuly), and his repeated attempts to escape the drudgery of his insurance office job, whether via his writing or his failed attempt to join the army during the First World War.<\/p>\n

\n\tRequired to shore up most of the film\u2019s disparate floating parts with his stoic, haunted presence, big-screen newcomer Idan Weiss brings some sense of fractured soul to proceedings \u2014 as well as a credible resemblance to Kafka himself, in line with the particular historical detailing that underpins Holland\u2019s wilder flights of fancy. (He\u2019s also, incidentally, a near dead ringer for French actor Pierre Niney, star of Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s wholly unrelated period piece \u201cFrantz.\u201d) Still, he can\u2019t really animate scenes that, on their own terms, hew closer to Masterpiece Theater than the film\u2019s more anarchic overall design, and border on repetitive wherever they\u2019re placed in the whole. Kafka\u2019s dysfunctional relationship with his father is consistent across decades, a point underlined by perhaps too many twinned vignettes of trauma rooting and roosting.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFranz\u201d is most interesting when it reaches outside its subject\u2019s lifespan to bridge Kafka\u2019s modest existence with our outsize impression of him today \u2014 ambitiously though not always successfully. A moving coda dramatizes the risks his friend and colleague Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) took to preserve and protect Kafka\u2019s writings after his death, even through the rise of anti-intellectual fascism in the 1930s. <\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, recurring cutaways to present-day tours at an exaggerated interpretation of Prague\u2019s real-life Kafka Museum strike an odd note. There\u2019s some wisdom in their depiction of how Kafka\u2019s personal and creative struggles are vulnerable to romanticization by educators, curators and indeed by filmmakers, whether or not Holland counts herself in that bracket. But a sour straw-man swipe at a tourist industry packaging his name into literal \u201cKafka Burgers\u201d feels off-base. It would be selling Holland\u2019s artistry and curiosity short to suggest \u201cFranz,\u201d with its profusion of gimmicky liberties and historical name-checking, is a Kafka burger itself \u2014 but it\u2019s at least something of a chopped Kafka salad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As biopic subjects go, Franz Kafka is resistant to standard-issue treatment on a number of levels \u2014 beginning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[68974,81237,49,48,75,83081,337,83018],"class_list":["post-159129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-agnieszka-holland","tag-busan-film-festival","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-franz","tag-movies","tag-san-sebastian-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}