QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN

There should be a EU directive banning directors from making painfully conventional and unimaginative biopics of genuinely subversive artists. Surely Sidney Sheldon and Dan Brown would merit such tribute. Franz Kafka however – perhaps the most transgressive and influential literary genius of the 20th century – must be rolling in his grave. Agnieszka Holland’s Franz does not honour his legacy in any shape or form. The film is neither fun nor informative. Neither original nor audacious. Instead, it is a highly schematic biopic with extra elements haphazardly thrown in to very confusing results.

There is very little contextualisation. We are never told when and where the story began, or even when and where Kafka died. The cause of his death is never revealed (his struggle with tuberculosis is indeed portrayed, however the 76-year-old Polish director and writer Marek Epstein simply forget to elucidate that the disease in fact claimed his life. Instead, for an interminable duration of 127 minutes, the film zigzags back and forth in time between Kafka’s adult years in Prague and Berlin, as well as flashes of his childhood (Daniel Dongres delivers the child version of the protagonist) in the the Czech capital. Played by a blank-faced and uninspiring Idan Weiss as an adult, the Czech author is portrayed as a quiet and timid man riven by family allegiances, matrimonial duties and his passion for writing.

We learn that Franz was born to a German-speaking family living in a largely Czech-speaking city, and that the writer described his work as a combination of “Czech poetry” and “German language”. His controlling father frowned upon his writing ambitions and instead wanted him to work in a factory. It was his sister Ottla that supported most of hs decisions. The younger ones Valli and Elli were a lot more distant and indifferent. To his father’s further disappointment, his only male child decided to marry a poor woman called Felice (Carol Schuler). But those plans never came to fruition because Franz suddenly decided that he was “not worth he love”. He was infatuated with one of Felice’s friends, to whom he wrote numerous and extensive letters (which he then proceeded to burn).

Those not familiar with Kafka’s extensive work, will leave the cinema with little understanding of his writing style, and the content of his novels. The protagonist reads passages of The Trial to his friends, however the unsuspecting viewer is never provided with coherent information about Josef K’s absurd predicament in court. The only most significant allusions to The Metamorphosis are a cockroach walking across the dinner table and Kafka’s fingers fusing together. These events are never tied together, and nothing comes full circle. Instead, the film is strangely concerned with Franz’s experience in a nudist sanatorium (nude camp), a one-off event that he briefly described in one letter (and which never made it into a novel). The horrific needle torture scene of short story In the Penal Colony is present, too. Again, it hardly fits in with the rest of the film.

There is little insight into how Franz’s career evolved, how his oeuvre received international recognition and influenced others. Franz often discusses his world views with his Zionist friend Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz), who is adamant that Jews should have their own state. We see Max being banned from non-Jewish areas and images of what looks like a concentration camp. I have no idea how this is relevant to Franz Kafka’s story, since he died in 1924 (nearly 10 years before the Nazis rose to power).

Some of the symbolisms and allegories are infantile and lame. Franz falls to the ground and watches under the skirts of the women who come to his help, only for one of them to pop a cherry in his mouth. A corporal performance of a hollering Franz painted in white is rather cringey: for a split second, I could see Michael Jackson in the Scream music video.

Images of the present-day Kafka museum in Prague are clumsily inserted into the movie. The audio guide asks visitors to choose their language. A woman explains that literature about Kafka dwarfs the writer’s output one to ten million. We see the burger place serving the same food he ate 100 years ago (“vegetarian” burgers of cows that grazed on the mountains). And we see David Černý’s kinetic sculpture the Head of Franz Kafka, outside of the Quadrio shopping mall of Prague. It feels random and unnecessary. The audiovisual merchandise of a very demanding sponsor. An epilogue sliced into cutaway sequences for no apparent reason.

Franz is in the Official Competition of the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival. A tribute nobody asked for, and a misfire in the career of a director with a respectable filmography.