Screening at TIFF: Agnieszka Holland’s ‘Franz’

Ambitious to a fault, Kafka biopic Franz is as much about the landmark Czech surrealist as it is about its own making, as a commercialized re-telling of a life cut tragically short. It isn’t the first time Polish virtuoso Agnieszka Holland has approached the legendary author—she produced a televised theatrical production of Kafka’s The Trial in the early 1980s—but her film feels like a fresh (albeit contradictory) look at Kafka’s mundane, bourgeois life, and the not-so-mundane world around him.

Far from the standard birth-to-death chronicle afforded most famous figures, Franz dispenses with this well-worn structure early on. Within minutes, it hops and skips from his childhood in the late 19th Century to his synagogue memorial just 40 years later, roping in various perspectives about the Jewish author at a time when state forces were slowly encroaching. Even to those who knew him, Kafka was something of a troubled mystery, and this unknowability guides the movie’s discombobulated structure.

It’s a film that presents Kafka in shards. On one hand, it hits the expected beats of unveiling the paternal melancholy that impacted his work and psyche. On the other hand, it still frames him as an unknown (and perhaps even unknowable) quantity, despite its own efforts to psychoanalyze him. Its style is practically repulsive to the average viewer, who might be anticipating linear bullet points about Kafka’s life, with a few Easter eggs about how his most famous stories came to be.

Some of these are sprinkled across the runtime as imagined re-enactments of early drafts—in this way, Holland adapts multiple Kafka stories all at once—but the camera also makes overt and literal attempts to penetrate his psyche, weaving through space and pushing and punching in like an episode of The Office. It is, however, met with a meek and mysterious melancholy from actor Idan Weiss, who creates the film’s most alluring paradox: the idea that Kafka was plagued by simple things, which, as if by some magical, unknowable process, became infinitely complex in his mind.

That we’re never made privy to this process of transformation is both frustrating and, for better or worse, the point. The man’s romances and familial relationships are far more central to the story, but the question of what we’re actually sitting down to learn about him is one the movie probes with mischievous purpose. Right as it seems Holland might touch on Kafka’s alleged schizophrenia—using a single, fleeting flourish of stop-motion and rear projection—the filmmaker’s kaleidoscopic view of her subject widens when his visions begin taking shape as premonitions, or perhaps even time travel, to modern, expensive European museums that house artifacts and curios relating to his work, as well-paid tour guides seek to answer questions from eager tourists.

A fictitious “Kafka Burger” restaurant in the style of Burger King even commercializes his documented vegetarianism, making for the movie’s rare surreal and satirical brushstroke. Holland all but stops short of invoking mass-produced Che Guevara t-shirts to make her point about the vulturous ways Kafka’s work and life have been canonized a century following his death—a process in which, she seems to posit, she is hardly innocent either.

However, it’s worth asking if Holland sometimes confuses unknowability for inapproachability altogether. Her conception of Kafka, the cultural myth, is mysterious, but it seldom frames Kafka the person as enigmatic (though it could be said that this serves the movie’s many intentional contradictions). He’s an awkward loner stuck in his ways, and Weiss makes a meal out of this sad-clown interpretation, even though we end up no closer to knowing him, or knowing facts about him, by the movie’s end. Franz has little interest in re-creating Kafka’s signature phantasmagoria, since—as a modern museum curator explains—writing about Kafka outweighs his own work by 10 million to one.

Rather than adding her voice to an already noisy chorus, Holland lures in a multitude of perspectives, both modern and contemporaneous, and often has characters break away from their drama with Kafka to directly address the camera. In the age of vloggers (and, er, Deadpool), this hardly counts as a surreal departure from established visual language, but Holland doesn’t try to re-create Kafka’s style. The moments in Franz that are genuinely “Kafkaesque” can be counted on one hand. Instead, the biopic seems to take its stylistic cues from one of Kafka’s contemporaries: Pablo Picasso, who was developing his cubist style while the author was still alive. The movie ping-pongs between points of view—both between scenes and within them—so rapidly and archly that it turns its subject into an abstract mural, seen from as many perspectives as possible, all at once. How else could one accurately depict what Kafka is, and means, in the modern consciousness than by creating a filmic collage of the many outlooks making up that aforementioned 10 million figure?

In Franz, the horrors of the modern world always seem to unfold in the background, including and especially the growing fascism and antisemitism that would lead to the Holocaust (a subject Holland has approached several times before). Kafka had been dead for over a decade by World War II, but if Franz reveals anything about his work, it’s that it ought not to be interpreted in isolation, regardless of how cut off its author may have seemed from the world around him. All art is a product of time and place—even Holland’s esoteric approach feels born from a hyperactive internet age—but something that readings of Kafka, as a window to the human subconscious, tend to elide is the lurking evils that may have been on people’s minds as Nazi atrocities loomed.

The phantasms in Kafka’s work didn’t materialize from thin air, and the retrospective lens Holland applies to Franz feels almost hopeful in its urgency to use hindsight as a Rosetta Stone for how we read the world around us. It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was—which Holland depicts by tethering his consciousness to our fragile present, and constructing, in the process, a bridge to the past.

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