by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Idan Weiss, Peter Kurth, Jenovefa Bokova, Sebastian Schwarz
Intro:
... haunting, and it’s both subtle and intense. And it’s great.
Franz: Becoming Kafka is a very ambitious film, including in its creation: five countries of origin, six languages spoken onscreen … But more importantly, in what it tries to capture: both Franz Kafka the man (1883-1924) and the ‘idea’ of him. It could so easily have been a noble failure, but it’s a resounding success.
This is a biopic — except when it isn’t. It eludes easy classification, but then so does its subject, a point which is illustrated magnificently here. He has, after all, long since become a concept and a symbol, and not so much a noun as an adjective (Kafkaesque), rather than ‘just’ a brilliant Czech writer. In real life, as opposed to posthumously, he was not always angst-ridden and he’s sometimes shown here being calm and even (heresy of heresies) quite happy.
God knows why he was, though. Kafka’s father Hermann (Peter Kurth) was tyrannical, and there was plenty of turbulence and stress in his childhood, young adulthood and relationships, both romantically and within his family. Not to mention major health problems. Some of these things are simply acted out, while other aspects are represented by nightmarish quasi-animated sequences. There’s also a horrifically visceral enactment of a very violent scene from his short story In The Penal Colony … You won’t soon forget the brief non sequitur showing tug-of-war teams with animal heads; somehow, inexplicably, it feels right … Then there is the Brechtian technique whereby some of the characters speak directly to the camera … And the anachronistic sequences in which we jump almost a century to see aspects of the vast Kafka ‘industry’ at work in present-day Prague, justifiably enough at museum level but reaching its nadir in a shop which sells “Kafka burgers’’.
Through all this — even, in a sense, the present-day bits — moves FK himself, played absolutely superbly by Idan Weiss, who is an uncanny lookalike almost to the point of being a doppelgänger.
Director Agnieszka Holland and co-writer Marek Epstein assume a certain understanding and knowledge about their subject, and they don’t tell us everything about Kafka’s life, let alone his work. (That would probably be impossible in a feature-length movie.) What they do show us, they put across just about perfectly.
Franz: Becoming Kafka is haunting, and it’s both subtle and intense. And it’s great.
Don’t miss it.
