KAFKA
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
KAFKA is a film by Steven Soderburgh with a screenplay written by Lem Dobbs. The film stars Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell, Joel Gray, Ian Holm, Alec Guinness, Jeroen Krabbe, Armin Mueller-Stahl. Rated PG-13 for brief violence, mature themes.
KAFKA is the brilliant follow-up to Steven Soderburgh's debut film SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE. It is like its predecessor only insofar as it too is a chance-taker, a long-shot project, this time based on a ten-year-old script by Lem Dobbs (THE HARD WAY). It is also a film that is inevitably going to be compared both to Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL and David Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH; however, the other film that I was reminded of, and which almost certainly influenced Soderburgh, was THE WIZARD OF OZ. More about this later, however.
First, you should clearly understand that the conceit of KAFKA is like that of the film HAMMETT, namely that a famous author in the days before his fame becomes involved in a situation that is a pastiche of his most famous, or most typical, works. In the course of the story, the necessarily literate viewer is invited to pick out references to the author's stories. In HAMMETT, for example, the title character has table lamp the base of which looks just like the black Maltese falcon in the Bogey movie. In KAFKA, there are references to "Metamorphosis," "The Trial," "The Castle," at a minimum. However, this is a fantasy on the theme of Kafka, not a biopic, not film version of a Kafka story, and it is most certainly not that tired old cliche Kafkaesque, and it sure as heck ain't Merchant and Ivory quaint.
Instead, what we have is Jeremy Irons is a wonderful performance. Of course, Irons is one of our very best film actors, but it is always surprising to be once again reminded of his range and versatility. Some critics think the Irons is merely walking through the role, but I think they are underestimating how much skill is involved in the kind of nervous, intense, withdrawn-from-life characterization with which Irons delineates his Kafka.
Irons is supported by an amazing cast: Theresa Russell as Gabriela, the seductive revolutionary; Joel Gray as the office-messenger Burgel, who seems to have a lot more power than your average messenger ("Aha! Away from your section, without cause!"); Alec Guinness as the Chief Clerk, who advises Kafka "You should find a more athletic hobby -- put some color in your cheeks"; Armin Stahl-Mueller (lately in Barry Levinson's AVALON) as Inspector Grubach; the slapstick team of Ludwig and Oscar (Keith Allen and Simon McBurney) who are assigned to be Kafka's assistants at the soul-killing Accident and Insurance Compensation Association where he's been clerking for nearly nine years. About his job, he asks a co-worker: "You've never felt it was a horrible double life from which there was no escape but insanity?" And then there's Ian Holm as Dr. Murnau, the name being a sly reference to the legendary German director F. W. Murnau. Not to forget, Jeroen Krabbe as the stonecutter who admires Kafka's writing and who supplies clues to the Castle that dominates the storyline as it does the skyline of Prague.
Dobbs has complained that Soderburgh mangled his script, but whatever the truth the fact that remains that filmed script does an elegant and intelligent job of drawing on Kafka's life and works to make its absurdist points, at least until it detours into horror-movie mode. It is in this part of the movie that Soderburgh invites comparison, and a pale one, with BRAZIL. However, a more favorable comparison of the two movies would mention the sly and sometimes hilarious humor of much of the absurdism, especially Kafka's lines.
Just as witty at times are the photography and sets. Soderburgh and his cinematographer Walt Lloyd make superb use of the Prague locations. Most of the film is shot in black and white. Some of this actually started my heart racing with its beauty. The section of the story transpiring inside the Castle is shot in color, and Kafka's entry into this world of color, horror, and surreality has got to be modeled on the moment Dorothy opens the door of the house and reveals Munchkinland. The color is what I (in my lamentable ignorance of film technology) think of as supersaturated like what I believe is called the three-strip color of old Technicolor, that unnaturally rich, jewel-like, painterly color of Errol Flynn's ROBIN HOOD, especially.
The fantasy reaches its climax in this color sequence, but when Kafka returns to the black and white world of Prague outside the Castle there is a new look of unreality to this "real" world. I don't know if it was just me, or if the cinematography was different in the last b-and-w segment than in the first, maybe focused slightly differently. But I had the same reaction when Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas: those people are quite as real; Kansas isn't quite as real as Oz. Once you've been vouchsafed a vision, the quotidian world is changed forever. Certainly Kafka's character is different in the last morgue scene than in the comparable scene earlier in the movie.
Have I told you I loved Steven Soderburgh's KAFKA? See this film, do yourself a real treat. It may not, as some critics say, have the "lyrical perfection of SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE" (Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times), but it is a stunning performance both by this still new director and his wonderful cast. KAFKA will certainly achieve some kind of cult status, for good or ill, and it will certainly be paired in revival houses with NAKED LUNCH, with which KAFKA shares some creative sensibilities and motives. But see it now while it's still a fresh, invigorating, stand-alone experience. And the cost be hanged.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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