The biopic is such a staid genre that any attempt at doing something unique with its form is cause for excitement, if not outright celebration.
Franz is that sort of daring endeavor, investigating the life of famed writer and novelist Franz Kafka through a kaleidoscopic lens that allows fiction and reality, memory, and fantasy, and the past, present, and future to freely commingle like intertwining streams.
The follow-up to her harrowing 2023 refugee drama Green Border, acclaimed Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s latest strives to capture the texture and emotion of—and to conjure the forces at play in—the iconic author’s life and work. There are a few slight stumbles, but in terms of ambition and bravura alone, it remains one of the early standouts of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Going into Franz with some knowledge of Kafka is recommended, as Holland and Marek Epstein’s script wastes no time establishing straightforward particulars, all of which only become clear as the action courses along its backward-and-forwards currents.
Nonetheless, the film’s opening late-1880s sight of a young Franz (Daniel Dongres) getting his hair cut by his father Hermann (Peter Kurth), and then transforming in the chair into his older self (Idan Weiss), conveys the paternal power dynamics that dominate the writer’s life.
A Prague businessman who expects his son to work at the family’s clothing and accessories store, Hermann is a big, bellicose figure with a domineering attitude toward everyone and everything in his orbit, from his wife Julie (Sandra Korzeniak) and his three daughters Valli (Anna Cisarovská), Ellie (Marta Dancingerová), and Ottla (Katharina Stark), to his sole living son Franz, whose two brothers died in infancy.
Franz begins in a swirl, segueing swiftly between a pseudo-eulogy delivered by blind friend Oskar Baum (Aaron Friesz), Hermann leaving adolescent Franz on an apartment balcony so he and Julie can have sex (which the boy spies through the window), Franz being subsumed by a shadowy animated figure in a coat and top hat and, afterwards, a flock of crows, and Franz acquiescing to Hermann’s demand that he carry out a business assignment at the expense of a public reading of his writing—a decision that greatly upsets Franz’s beloved sibling Ottla.
Holland races through these vignettes at dizzying speed, and the effect is destabilizing and invigorating. That continues as the film barrels forward and the accumulation of seemingly disconnected moments begin to coalesce into a more coherent picture.
On the street, Franz waxes ecstatic to Ottla about revelatory Jewish theater that “shows us what lies behind us so we can understand where we actually want to go.” This is an expression of an artistic ethos, and it’s expanded upon when the two encounter a beggar asking for a crown, Franz gives him a two-crown piece and asks for change, and is denied and viewed as rude for requesting it, inspiring him to declare, “We are all responsible for what we say…All words have a unique, unmistakable weight!”
Before that sentiment can be developed further, though, Franz zooms onward into a mélange of theatrical performances, dream sequences, and the brief sight of young Franz running outside to help push his uncle’s motorcycle, falling down, and gazing upwards at his sisters’ almost-visible undergarments.
Despair, exhilaration, resentment, fear, inquisitiveness, and intellectual principles all collide in Franz, whose palette intermittently shifts from color to monochrome, and whose camerawork (courtesy of Tomasz Naumiuk) dances, spins, and tumbles about with a combination of balletic grace and hallucinatory feverishness.
Holland afford glimpses of her protagonist at the insurance company jobs at which he’s forced, unhappily, to toil, thereby providing the proceedings with touches of Kafkaesque drollness: the young man hopping on an elevator that’s automatically descending at the same time the adjoining one is ascending; or an office meeting with his superiors in which the sound of water dripping from the ceiling into a basin—an absurd contrast to the lofty proclamations about the establishment—cause Franze to uncontrollably giggle. A cockroach, unsurprisingly, also receives an amusing cameo.
Throughout, Holland makes no concessions to straightforward A-to-B plotting, and yet Franz does settle into a comfortable, lucid rhythm.
Amidst peeks at Franz dancing strangely in his underwear and rowing crew by himself on a lake, the film dramatizes his rocky engagement to Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), a woman he finds more attractive in his mind than in person, his brief enlistment in WWI, and his efforts to write, which are greeted with enthusiasm by friend Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) and Ottla if not, alas, Hermann.
Lest one lean on Freudian psychology to explain the root cause of Franz’s problems, however, the author’s uncle casually dismisses the notion—one of many instances in which the fourth wall is broken, amplifying the material’s hypnotic headiness.
Franz’s title suggests that Holland wants to know the man rather than the legend, and in most respects, she successfully puts her subject’s messy experiences and entanglements ahead of his prose.
Less effective is her desire to cast him as a distinctly modern figure who’s relatable to 21st-century audiences—a tack taken via contemporary interludes in and around Prague’s Franz Kafka Museum, where tour guides contextualize his prodigious letter-writing output by comparing it to emails and tweets (he’s described as a veritable “third millennium personality”), as well as discuss his fondness for grass-fed beef. These sequences don’t expand the film’s portrait so much as awkwardly intrude upon the action proper, disrupting its idiosyncratic flow.
Franz’s fatal tuberculosis diagnosis and late affair with married Milena (Jenovéfa Boková), as well as his clan’s eventual demise in the Holocaust, get Franz back on track, and in fact prove to be its most moving and assured chapters. Some of that has to do with the haunting Weiss’ performance, whose slender frame and pale visage make him vaguely resemble a mime (or silent movie star), and whose wonky demeanor and comportment are emblematic of the film’s unconventional and off-kilter style.
Mostly, though, it’s due to Holland’s command of tone and pace, both of which combine to shine a novel light on an oft-pored-over author; the tour guide opines that the ratio of words written by Kafka to the words written about him is one to ten million. In the process, she puts a refreshingly eccentric spin on the staid biopic.
The post Franz Kafka Gets a Fittingly Unconventional Biopic at TIFF appeared first on The Daily Beast.
