If nothing else, “Franz” will get the handwriting proper. Positive, praising somebody’s calligraphy is the quintessential backhanded praise, however with regards to Kafka, the penmanship is essential. The Czech literary titan was well-known for preferring to write down longhand, even after the explosion of the typewriter. His manuscripts are displayed in museums internationally, having attained an nearly legendary standing. Agnieszka Holland’s feverish new biopic on Kafka usually finds itself pouring over his desk or sneaking glimpses of his love letters. In a surreal tableaux, these pages swirl on the steps of his devoted museum in modern-day Prague, trampled by guests as they move by. It’s as if, by ogling convincing simulacra of the previous, she might uncover some hidden aspect of the person buried by standard tradition and the goldfish reminiscence of historical past.
However these pages are nothing greater than stable replicas. They’re superficial choices to a shallow hagiography, an sadly apt microcosm of the remainder of the movie. “Franz” is a complete misfire — outrageous and bland in equal measure. Almost each garish flight of fancy that decorates the body is a distraction whereas nearly all of the movie does little greater than rotely dramatize Kafka’s biography.
That final level is not any exaggeration. Holland and Marek Epstein’s screenplay breathlessly regurgitates an aggregated reality sheet of Kafka’s life. It feels as if there isn’t a single occasion, want or character trait demonstrated by any particular person throughout the movie that doesn’t seem on Kafka’s Wikipedia web page. We observe Kafka from his early readings by his torrid, long-distance affairs with numerous girls, till his eventual loss of life from tuberculosis. There are occasional flashbacks to his childhood, in addition to moments out-of-time, the place Kafka finds himself within the modern-day Czech republic, however none of this alleviates the pacing doldrums of a standard biopic. That is exacerbated by a script that condenses occasions to the purpose the place no inventive liberties might fairly match. At a single, two-minute dinner, Hermann Kafka smashes a cockroach whereas denigrating his son’s engagement to Felice Bauer earlier than reiterating his distaste for Franz’s writing. Satirically given its topic, the construction of “Franz” is terminally incurious.
This literalism extends throughout the complete image. The actors seem to have been chosen primarily based on their likenesses alone. The costume division makes positive to recreate any outfits worn in out there photographs of real-life counterparts. Each time the dialogue threatens to change into stunning, it seems to be a direct quote from Kafka’s personal writing, transposed into informal dialog. Oftentimes, main sources from these round him are reshaped into monologues delivered straight to digicam, akin to a talking-head in a documentary. The chosen snippets are uniformly mournful and sycophantic, however right here is the primary instance of many stylistic misfires. The implication of this motif is {that a} digicam has collapsed time; that it has primarily summoned these tertiary figures for interviews. In impact, that is only a trope of mondo movies — or, much less charitably, mockumentaries. A second the place Franz’s sister catches her hair on a department and mugs the digicam prompted the thought: “Has anyone concerned seen ‘The Workplace?’”
Agneiszka Holland is clearly no hack, nor has she essentially misplaced her contact within the twilight of her profession (“Inexperienced Border” premiered two years in the past to widespread acclaim). She is, nevertheless, a maximalist, to each her profit and detriment. That is apparent within the movie’s greatest scene, a dramatization of “In The Penal Colony.” The setpiece is brutally grotesque, darkly comedian, and viscerally bold. It evokes not simply what made Kafka distinctive, but additionally how his sensibility has proliferated all through all genres of artwork over the previous century, from the surrealists of the ’20s to the grindhouse cinema that adopted a couple of a long time later. Right here and nowhere else, Holland treats Kafka’s oeuvre not as summary fodder for pithy musing, however as texts which had been printed at an actual level in historical past, that got here from the thoughts of an individual and never a divine conduit.
Sadly, few of Holland’s different gambits repay. More and more over its two-hour runtime, I discovered myself asking a single query: Why? Why is each fifth shot a crash zoom? Why does a cherry seem dangling above a fallen Franz’s lips as he peeps up the skirts of some ladies? Why present Franz taking part in tug-of-war bare at a sanitarium with a bunch of males sporting animal masks? Why embody a joke the place People, unable to understand his genius, are funneled right into a vacationer lure known as “Kafka Burgers”? Why are there a number of anachronistic Polish indie rock needle drops? It’s not that symbolic significance of those moments is tough to parse. It’s that they’re so redundant, so cliched, so catastrophically foolish, that I’m shocked they made it right into a completed venture.
Maybe that is significantly noticeable as a result of the thematic preoccupations of the movie are so trite. If Holland has any novel insights into Franz Kafka — as a person, artist, or icon — they’re fully absent right here. Regardless of the film’s concentrate on his romantic trysts, it stays at a strict take away from his personal neuroses round intimacy. There are repeated nods to Kafka’s Jewish identification, although there is no such thing as a reckoning with how this has formed the notion and affect of his work over the following century. Regardless of fixed feedback about how Kafka’s tales spoke to the general public, Holland is reticent for example any specifics. By no means does anyone within the movie deviate from their pre-ordained archetype; by no means does Kafka, Holland’s invention, deviate from Kafka, the legend. Right here, a singular man and canonical artist is rendered one more sexually pissed off, misunderstood, tortured genius. There’s a kernel of an concept on this ethos, that any try to know such a cultural behemoth inevitably leads to the perpetuation of what it seeks to reject. Alas, at no level does that really feel like a acutely aware purpose of the movie.
There’s little to outright suggest about “Franz,” although I’ll admit I didn’t have a nasty time with it. The movie pulses with an old-school vanity that I discover charming. It has a honest perception that Kafka is among the most essential figures to ever stay. It believes within the enviable martyrdom of the solitary artist. It has a younger Franz in a jail cell, on a stage, surrounded by mirrors, as a result of one or two visible metaphors wouldn’t have been sufficient. It’s absolutely a failure, nevertheless it has twice the soul and keenness of many technically profitable footage from lesser artists. If solely that had been sufficient.
Grade: D+
“Franz” premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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