‘Franz’ Review: Kafka as Tourist Attraction in a Self-Aware Biopic

Anyone who sets out to tell a story about Franz Kafka seems to feel compelled to add some extra rhetorical twist to the film. The most common approach (see Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka) is to frame the story within some device that can be deemed “Kafkaesque,” preferably in black and white. Others, like the Argentine 1988 movie Los amores de Kafka, went as far as involving a filmmaker traveling to Prague to shoot a movie about the writer. Franz, despite being directed by Agnieszka Holland—a veteran filmmaker who usually works within classical, traditional narrative models, especially in biopics and historical films—also falls into the temptation of “finding a new angle,” as if Kafka couldn’t be approached without adding some unexpected or, let’s say, modern narrative device.

Perhaps it’s the labyrinthine nature of his stories, or simply the fact that his life wasn’t exactly a spectacular chain of major events, but the truth is that Kafka’s biography is rarely told in a linear fashion. In the case of Franz, what we get is a kaleidoscopic, intermittently inventive and fairly self-referential version that plays with Kafka’s life, his work, and his immense reputation as an author—to the point of becoming a tourist attraction in its own right. Thus, a scene might show Franz entering a river for a swim and, after a camera pan, we suddenly encounter a group of Asian tourists taking selfies at that very spot, guided by someone explaining that, yes, this is where the writer used to swim and then lie in the sun.

This structure becomes a constant throughout the film, combined with an achronological narration that moves back and forth across different stages of the author’s life, including the fate of much of his work—whose destiny remained uncertain even after his early death at the age of forty. While some of his better-known texts were published during his lifetime (The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, among others), Kafka was not famous while alive. His reputation skyrocketed only after the “controversial” decision of his agent and friend Max Brod to publish his remaining novels (The Trial, The Castle, and others) and his many letters after his death, despite Kafka’s explicit request that they be destroyed. In fact, Brod’s own misadventures in getting those texts published could easily sustain an adventure film of their own.

The film moves through Franz’s childhood (with an Idan Weiss uncannily resembling the author’s photographs) in a Prague household dominated by a harsh and aggressive father (Peter Kurth), alongside a kind mother (Sandra Korzeniak) and several siblings, including Ottla (Katarina Stark), his favorite and confidante. From there it shifts to his adolescence, his passion for writing hidden behind a tedious job at an insurance company, his personal insecurities, brief readings or stagings of his texts, and, especially, the various complicated love affairs (with Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, and Milena Jesenská) in which he became entangled in a somewhat chaotic fashion.

These temporal shifts constantly intersect with strolls through a Prague that seems to celebrate him on every corner—including a large and peculiar statue—and with a museum guide who, while explaining details of his life, connects various historical and biographical dots. Some of these elements are clever and subtle, while others (like tourists eating “the hamburgers Kafka used to eat”) verge on a rather banal kind of mockery. The interplay between the two modes of storytelling—often blended within the same scenes—works fairly naturally, though at times it blurs the specific tensions Kafka experienced in his life.

The mechanism becomes so evident that, at a certain point, one is more interested in anticipating the next meta-narrative device than in Kafka’s story itself. And while Weiss manages to convey the mix of emotions and contradictions that defined his character—shy, sensitive, withdrawn, yet also capable of cruelty and even aggression—Franz gradually loses its center of gravity. Meanwhile, the parallel misadventures of Max (Sebastian Schwarz), in a later period, as he tries to “save” Kafka’s work, get tangled in the convoluted narrative structure and lose much of their potential, even their epic dimension.

Still, Franz succeeds in crafting a more or less intriguing portrait of the author’s personality, his work, and, above all, his transformation into an iconic figure in which reality and myth are now completely intertwined. With an unusually brisk pace—both for the director of Europa Europa and for this kind of biopic—the film about the great Czech writer may be flawed and, in more than one sense, fragile in its underused dramatic potential, but it nonetheless manages to extract a number of genuine, affecting moments from the life of its celebrated and enigmatic protagonist.