Biopic

“Franz is a writer who doesn’t like to talk,” says Franz Kafka’s agent in this playful and oddly endearing biopic of the enigmatic Czech author, who died in 1924 aged just 40. Kafka’s output was slim but influential, the film notes, reporting that works about Kafka outnumber pieces by him at a rate of 10 million to one. That ratio is more impressive given that they were smuggled out of Europe in a suitcase at the dawn of the Second World War, and, given Kafka’s Jewish roots, could very easily have been lost forever. Coincidentally, Agnieska Holland’s film Franz — which competes in Competition at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival — appears shortly after the loss of another mighty 20^th century artist, David Lynch, who described Kafka as “the one artist that I feel could be my brother”. Lynch would likely have approved of this experimental take on Kafka’s life, with its dryly humorous flourishes and rich, almost Magrittean color palette.

Like Lynch, Kafka’s work both invites interpretation and refuses it at the same time, and it’s to the director’s credit that Holland — working from an intelligent script by Marek Epstein — stays clear of amateur psychology. Though she does illustrate one of his key texts (the gruesome short story In the Penal Colony, which causes outrage at its first public reading), Holland doesn’t look to his life for explanations. Instead, by mapping out his relatively normal upbringing — there is nothing at all “Kafkaesque” about it, to use the word coined to describe his enduringly surreal and dark bureaucratic fables — Franz marvels at the depth and strangeness of his intellect, which confounds his overbearing father who takes a dim view of his son’s “stupid writing”.

Franz doesn’t say as much out loud, but it seems likely that Kafka was on what we now call the spectrum, as we see in an early scene where he demands change of a two-krone coin from a bemused street beggar. But part of Kafka’s drive is something altogether less tangible; art was soon to enter its avant-garde phase in the early 20^th century, and the writer turns out to be much more bohemian than his bourgeois upbringing suggests, showing a keen interest in underground Yiddish theater. Key to understanding this is his bizarre relationship with Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), his on-off fiancée; Kafka — played with a charismatic opacity by Idan Weiss — seems neither to find her attractive nor does he want to be with her, a tension that doesn’t quite pan out the way you might expect.

In the meantime, as Kafka finds his voice, so does Prague, and it’s significant that the film takes place against the gentrification of the Czech capital and its break with Germany as an occupying culture (Holland, who studied there as a student in the ’60s, seems especially alert to this particular paradigm shift). And aside from some very modern artistic flourishes — including the fact that each character around Kafka breaks the fourth wall to discuss him — Holland brings the film explicitly into the modern day by taking us to the Franz Kafka Museum and teasing us with the concept of a Kafka Burger restaurant. Adding to the otherworldly ambience is the shifting jazz-folk score by Mary Komasa and Antoni Łazarkiewicz, which, like our hero, is similarly protean in nature.

Kafka’s short life is convenient for the purposes of storytelling, and it fits quite neatly into the film’s two-hour running time. The writer’s illness — tuberculosis of the larynx — is seen as a particularly cruel horror, albeit one in lockstep with his morbid imagination, which continued to work overtime. Surprisingly, in contrast to perceptions of Kafka as an introverted artist, locked away in his lonely garret, Franz shows him as a relatively robust, if skinny, young man, given to frequent exercise and a regular patron of the most absurd sanatoriums in Europe, a cue for lots of very amusing — not to mention acrobatic — full-frontal male nudity.

The one constant in Holland’s film is an unusual one for a biopic; the traditional approach being that each individual presents different facets of their true selves to different people. But in Franz, Kafka is pretty resolute in his identity and his eccentricities, notably in his insistence on writing all his now-famous literary works by hand. Everyone around him can agree on who Franz Kafka is, the bigger question is what. As the museum tour guide puts it: “Kafka’s work is locked, and he took the keys with him.” Holland’s film — selected by Poland as this year’s Oscar contender — invites you to ponder the conundrum that he left behind.

Title: Franz
Festival: San Sebastian (Competition)
Director: Agnieska Holland
Screenwriter: Marek Epstein
Cast: Idan Weiss, Carol Schuler, Jenovéfa Boková, Peter Kurth, Ivan Trojan, Sandra Korzeniak, Katharina Stark, Sebastian Schwarz Aaron Friesz
Sales agent: Films Boutique
Running time: 2 hrs 7 mins