Kafka (1991)

1st watched 10/3/1998 - 5 out of 10(Dir - Steven Sonderbergh): Despite it's excellent 1st hour with Jeromy Iron's playing a quirky insurance inspector investigating the strangeness surrounding his partner's disappearance, the movie get's lost in a Frankenstein mode and it never returns. The quest for the goings on in the castle do not lend to the humor of the 1st hour and seem to have needed to be in another movie.

Fmovies: This film is a waste of potential. Great actors. Great city. Great cinematography. Artistic and creative. A shame that the dialogue, characters and plot were so pathetic. All style, no substance. Don't waste your time on this one.

Much like David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch', 'Kafka' attempts to merge a biographical film and a literary adaptation, by combining elements from Franz Kafka's notoriously unfilmable books and stories with details from his real life. The thing is, where Steven Soderbergh's film is an admirable effort at filming Kafka's work, other films by more accomplished directors, made around the same time or several years earlier, managed to capture Kafka's spirit much more successfully without ever mentioning his name or the title of any of his works - Scorsese's 'After Hours', Woody Allen's 'Shadows and Fog', and to a lesser extent Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' and Joel & Ethan Coen's 'Barton Fink' all achieve Kafka's unique feeling of futility and paranoia, as well as his pitch black sense of humor, while 'Kafka' resembles Kafka's writing mainly on the surface. This is the script's fault more than Soderbergh's, because the film looks great and delivers the dark, weird disconcerting feeling of Kafka's works, but by not delving into the philosophy behind them, by having almost no sense of humor, and by adhering to a pretty straightforward conspiracy plot, it remains little more than an aesthetic illustration of what a Kafka film might look like.

Despite a weak script, the film manages several memorable scenes, mainly thanks to terrific cinematography and a wonderful cast - Jeremy Irons, surprisingly, not being one of the film's standout performance. Rather, it's more minor characters played by Joel Grey, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Keith Allen, Simon McBurney and the great Alec Guinness in his last feature film role that stick to the viewer's mind, and for brief moments they can create the sense of paranoia, of surreal, nightmarish bureaucracy that is at the root of Kafka's writing; again, without the underlying philosophy, there's something unsatisfying about the overall result, and the story keeps distracting from the more interesting aspects. The film is, overall, interesting but frustrating; it's probably worth watching for Kafka fans, but it's not good enough to truly appease them. On the other hand, it may be too confusing for anyone who isn't familiar enough with his work.

Kafka fmovies. The above statement (coined by myself in an odd bout of pretension) refers to any film in which the central character inhabits a world in which he/she has no say in their own outcome; everything is pre-destined from the start. The actors therefore become mere marionettes, puppets controlled by the film-makers as a function to drive the plot, or the story that is unfolding in this world. With Kafka, we never really feel too much of a connection with the man himself (main character Kafka played by Jeremy Irons), but we are interested in his outcome because the subjective reality of his world draws us in. Sometimes this idea of the atmosphere of a film being what draws us in can go horribly wrong, it's not like say, Gone in 60 seconds (2000)... I'm not talking about a thick, glowing sludgy style of cinematography that has become all the more popular with younger film-makers. I am instead talking about the more classical style of film, composition, lighting and production design... Kafka has this in spades.

Steven Soderbergh is possibly the most talented director at work at the moment (that's debatable, but he is the most talented American director of the last fifteen years), his ability to effortlessly switch both genre and cinematic devise is a talent most directors lack, but Soderbergh went from the low-key drama of Sex, Lies & Videotape to the arty-thriller Kafka, and then moved onto the arty-low-key drama King of the Hill... Those where films that where brimming with ideas, mood and a strong independent visual sense, something his more recent films lack. With Kafka, Soderbergh applied the dark, noir-ish style of Wells and Bergman, with just the right blend of modern multi-media devises, colour is used to show the jarring contrast between the real-world (the subjective reality) to the horror's of the Castle. The skewed angles and the editing of certain scenes not only give the film a certain style, but help the audience identify between the different dreamscapes the film switches between, weather it be the world or Kafka's own imagination.

Much has been said in recent IMDB reviews about how the film is a betrayal of Kafka, having never read a word of Kafka I cannot comment, but I think people should allow Soderbergh and writer Lem Dobbs some artistic licensing. This is not an attempt to tell the life story of Kafka, it's more a "what if..." scenario, what if actual events dictated the writings of Kafka. The film blares the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and this is the point, this is why the film is set-up to conform to Subjective reality, we are being taken into Kafka's own world, a world he has absolutely no control over. Besides, most people are missing the point, and that is the film is a fantasy, not historical document, none of these would be literati's have mentioned the exemplary acting of all concerned.

Jeremy Irons is an actor I usually have little time for, in all honesty I have only seen a handful of his films and few of them left an impression, but here he is cast well, his stuffy British-ness and detached glare makes him an almost mythical figure, drifting around the city unsure of what will happen next. And the supporting cast is very credible, with roles for the legendary Alec Guinness, Ian Holm in a role not too dissimilar to the one he played in Gilliam's Brazil, Verhoeven regular Jeroen Krabbé puts in an appearance as one of Kafka's few allies and Armin Mueller-Stahl plays the dogged police inspector. The only annoyance amongs

If you're an actual fan of Kafka, I would recommend steering clear of this one. If you're not, then I would say that this is the kind of film that people watch and say, "Wow, that's the kind of movie that makes you think," which is one of the dumbest things I think that can be said about a film. Such films, I have found, tend to bring up rather crude and elementary ideas and toss them out as something profound. (If a film really does make you think, you don't say so, because you probably watch films like that all the time anyway. So a movie which doesn't have the soundtrack running every 30 seconds is not new to you). If you think that Orwell's 1984 is a profound book, then you'll think this movie is enjoyable. If you know better, then you probably won't.

I didn't find Kafka (the film) very engaging at all. It did not make many attempts at subtle references to his works, which would have been fun at least. The closest we get is two assistants working for him in his office (The Castle), and Irons at one point is asked what he's working on and says a book about a man who wakes up to find himself turned into an insect. Of course there's the castle in the movie, etc.., but these are so obvious that they're dull. Small references to his life are also made, such as his asking Brod to destroy his works, he starts coughing up blood at the end, etc..

Kafka the film is like a decent landscape painter's works, you look at them, say oh that's nice, and move on to the next one. They lack the profound melancholy of a Friedrich, or the tempestuous battle of the elements, as in a Turner. Something within the soul of the artist which infuses his work with a meaning deeper than a mere reproduction of nature or his social environment.

What's missing in Kafka the film is what makes Kafka the author appealing. His books are not simple lessons about the dangers of totalitarianism or any such easily conjured up enemy. It's the existential torment of the protagonist which is so captivating. Whether Kafka is struggling with God, or authority, or bureaucracy, or modernity, is fun to bat around, but not the essential point.

The film is sophomoric, because rather than focus on or depict this struggle, it turns Kafka into some sort of prophet waging war against ideological biology and the democratization of mankind's soul. Can you read that into him? Perhaps. But don't turn an incredibly unique and profound author into a neo-Marxist political science major writing for the college newspaper.

What disturbed me the most about the film was that they had the gall to go into the castle and explain to you what was inside. The whole point of Kafka's work is that we DIDN'T KNOW what was going on there. So we get ushered into the castle and given an 8th grade ethics class. Pathetic.

Some see this film as a step down from Steven Soderbergh's brilliantly-constructed debut feature, "sex, lies and videotape." I see it as a significant step in his artistic development (even if its commercial and critical failure limited the audiences for his next several films). Certainly no one expected him to follow the low-key, character-driven "sex, lies" with such a complicated, stylized film as "Kafka."

An inspired script by Lem Dobbs and a great cast drive Soderbergh's visually rich film. Besides the leads, of note are Joel Grey as the self-important bureaucrat Burgel, Brian Glover as the menacing Castle Henchman, and Keith Allen and Simon McBurney as Kafka's side-splittingly incompetent "assistants." And Cliff Martinez's score (inspired by "The Third Man") is ingenious.

To call this film underrated would be a severe understatement.