Director Agnieszka Holland subverts traditional biopic structure in Franz, a fragmented look at the life of Franz Kafka, the Czech author who died in 1924.
Holland (Green Border) blends Kafka’s personal and aesthetic sensibilities with the quotidian aspects of a life that included a domineering father, loving relationships with his mother and one of his three sisters, and nondescript employment at an insurance company.
Disregarding chronological order, Holland leaps about in time, offering ample references to Kafka's work. At various points, Holland shows Kafka imagining that his hands are webbed, a conceit he used in his fiction.
These references sometimes feel forced, and it helps to be familiar with Kafka’s work if you want to catch them all.
In one such unmistakable effort, Kafka’s father crushes a cockroach that has wandered onto the dining room table, a brash joke that points to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel in which a man becomes a giant insect.
Raised in a German-Jewish family, Kafka’s imagination far surpassed the measured quality of his life. Kafka's relationship with his father becomes important but isn't offered as the sole explanation for his inward-looking personality.
In a sequence involving the young Kafka (Daniel Dongres), his beefy father (Peter Kurth) tosses his son into a river, a move designed to teach the boy to swim. Was Kafka scarred for life? Evidently not. We later learn that Kafka enjoyed swimming and swam throughout his life.
German-Israeli actor Idan Weiss plays the adult Kafka as a strange man who inspired a wave of kitsch in contemporary Prague. Holland shows us burger joints with Kafka's name. A kaleidoscope is one thing, but Holland’s present-day scenes, which include a guided tour of Kafka-related sights, are more disruptive than illuminating, self-conscious attempts to let us know that the misfit has been mainstreamed.
Kafka’s love life isn’t exactly scintillating, either. At one point, Kafka becomes engaged to Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), a woman in whom he shows little romantic interest. After falling for Bauer's best friend, the lively Greta Bloch (Gesa Schermuly), Kafka broke off his engagement to Bauer in embarrassing fashion.
Writing evidently didn't come easily for Kafka. Holland creates early scenes in which Kafka, while still living at home, tried to write amid household bustle and intrusions by a father who wanted his son to pay more attention to the family business. Kafka longs for silence.
Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924. He was 40, and his death preceded the Third Reich, which Holland points to in a late scene in which Kafka's confidant
Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) and his wife nervously deal with a Nazi soldier as they flee Prague. Brod had all of Kafka’s work with him. Without Brod, Kafka’s writing might never have been discovered.
Holland’s approach puts a considerable burden on Weis, who sometimes has the sly look of someone who’s protecting secrets no one else knows. Thin and prone to engaging in strange physical exercises, Kafka is tender with a prostitute but abandons the pursuit of pleasure when his attention suddenly shifts.
It’s possible to take this sudden shift as a metaphor for a movie that frequently shifts its attentions, sometimes in scenes in which characters -- notably one of Kafka's sisters -- break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera.
Working from a screenplay by Marek Epstein, Holland conveys the contradictions between Kafka’s interior life and bourgeois life in Prague, making room for information that can seem almost incidental.
We learn that Kafka wrote only in German and had no use for typewriters. He wrote by hand. At one point, Kafka checks into a sanitarium where the men march around nude and play games of tug of war in the nude. He seems to be having a good time.
Perhaps to give the uninitiated a sense of Kafka’s work, Holland presents a scene in which Kafka does a public reading of In the Penal Colony. Holland presents a bizarre reenactment of the story, which centers on a brutal but meaningless punishment.
At its best, Franz gives us a feeling for this odd, elusive fellow who saw the absurdity of institutions in a world of ungraspable rules.
The word "Kafkaesque" has become an overused cliche for anything that appears to be off-kilter. Holland works more slyly, but if Kafka’s life was a riddle, Holland’s movie, though sometimes vividly realized, doesn't solve it.
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