'Franz' Review: Agnieszka Holland's Kafka Biopic Is an Old-School Disaster

Agnieszka Holland's feverish new biopic on Franz Kafka often finds itself pouring over his desk or sneaking glimpses of his love letters, but these pages are nothing more than solid replicas - superficial offerings to a shallow hagiography.

The film's biggest misfire is its lack of curiosity about Kafka's life. Nearly every garish flight of fancy that decorates the frame is a distraction while the majority of the film does little more than rotely dramatize Kafka's biography. The script breathlessly regurgitates an aggregated fact sheet of Kafka's life, feeling as if there isn't a single event, desire or character trait demonstrated by any individual within the film that doesn't appear on Kafka's Wikipedia page.

The pacing doldrums of a conventional biopic are exacerbated by the script's condensing of events to the point where no artistic liberties could reasonably fit. A two-minute dinner scene features Hermann Kafka smashing a cockroach while denigrating his son’s engagement to Felice Bauer before reiterating his distaste for Franz’s writing.

The actors appear to have been chosen based on their likenesses alone, with the costume department ensuring that every outfit worn in available photos of real-life counterparts is recreated. The dialogue often turns into direct quotes from Kafka's own writing, transposed into casual conversation. This approach leads to a sense of literalism extending across the entire picture.

The chosen snippets are uniformly mournful and sycophantic, but there's also a sense that the camera has collapsed time; that it has essentially summoned these tertiary figures for interviews. The implication is that this is just a trope of mondo films - or, less charitably, mockumentaries.

One moment where Franz’s sister catches her hair on a branch and mugs the camera prompted the thought: "Has anybody involved seen 'The Office?'". This feeling of familiarity is not unique to this scene; it's a recurring theme throughout the film, which often feels like an homage rather than an original work.

Agnieszka Holland is obviously no hack, nor has she necessarily lost her touch in the twilight of her career. She is, however, a maximalist, to both her benefit and detriment. This is evident in the film's best scene, a dramatization of "In The Penal Colony." The setpiece is brutally gruesome, darkly comic, and viscerally ambitious.

It evokes not just what made Kafka unique, but also how his sensibility has proliferated throughout all genres of art over the past century. Here, Holland treats Kafka’s oeuvre not as abstract fodder for pithy musing, but as texts which were published at a real point in history, that came from the mind of a person and not a divine conduit.

Unfortunately, few of Holland's other gambits pay off. Increasingly over its two-hour runtime, I found myself asking a single question: Why? Why is every fifth shot a crash zoom? Why does a cherry appear dangling above a fallen Franz’s lips as he peeps up the skirts of some girls? Why show Franz playing tug-of-war naked at a sanitarium with a bunch of men wearing animal masks?

Why include a joke where Americans, unable to appreciate his genius, are funneled into a tourist trap called "Kafka Burgers"? Why are there multiple anachronistic Polish indie rock needle drops? It’s not that symbolic significance of these moments is hard to parse. It's that they are so redundant, so cliched, so catastrophically silly, that I am stunned they made it into a finished project.

Perhaps this is particularly noticeable because the thematic preoccupations of the film are so trite. If Holland has any novel insights into Franz Kafka — as a man, artist, or icon — they are entirely absent here. Despite the movie's focus on his romantic trysts, it remains at a strict remove from his own neuroses around intimacy.

There are repeated nods to Kafka’s Jewish identity, though there is no reckoning with how this has shaped the perception and influence of his work over the subsequent century. Despite constant talk about how Kafka's stories spoke to the public, Holland is reticent to illustrate any specifics.

Never does anybody in the film deviate from their pre-ordained archetype; never does Kafka, Holland’s invention, deviate from Kafka, the legend. Here, a singular man and canonical artist is rendered yet another sexually frustrated, misunderstood, tortured genius.

A Conclusion to an Unsettling Experience

The film pulses with an old-school arrogance that I find charming. It has a sincere belief that Kafka is one of the most important figures to ever live. It believes in the enviable martyrdom of the solitary artist. It has a young Franz in a jail cell, on a stage, surrounded by mirrors, because one or two visual metaphors would not have been enough.

It is surely a failure, but it has twice the soul and passion of many technically successful pictures from lesser artists. If only that were enough.