Franz Kafka makes us feel seen. That’s why I and millions of others have fallen in love with his work — devoured, analyzed and internalized it for decades. Through his writing, we see him. We can see his overwhelming pain and all-consuming love, his existentialist concerns and ever-present alienation. We see ourselves reflected in his deepest hopes, dreams and desires. We see this most in his diaries and letters to loved ones, all made public to share his brilliant mind and desperate heart with the world.
Kafka would’ve hated that.
Kafka never wanted his letters, diaries or many of his manuscripts published. He expressly asked a friend to burn them once he died, but the friend didn’t listen. We have access to his innermost workings, messages he wrote day and night to lovers, parents, siblings, friends — and we shouldn’t. Every time we read them, we posthumously invade his privacy. We destroy his quiet.
“Franz” shows us this invasion through its stylistic exploration of the life Kafka lived. The film offers a fictionalized version of the writer’s adulthood, complete with a distinct surrealism, letting us into his head as deeply as his diaries. We follow this Kafka (Idan Weiss, “Weltschmerz”) through the mundanities of his day-to-day life — the insurance job he never had any passion for, family dinners where his father ridicules him and his sisters cheer him up, moments searching for silence at his writing desk. There isn’t a part of him we can’t see.
The film shows him at his day job, tells us that he hates it, but still manages to sneak in moments of laughter at the ridiculousness of his bosses. Kafka’s laughs aren’t short and quiet — they’re loud and lengthy and boisterous. Weiss imbues his vision of Kafka with a levity that cuts through his intensity exactly when the audience needs a break. It’s a childlike fit that he throws, really, and that’s at the core of who this character is. He can find joy, however small a sliver, even in situations he doesn’t want to be in, a skill that many people spend lifetimes trying to master.
History would paint Kafka as a melancholic tortured artist — but he was much more than that. He had love for the world, and he found deep joy in it. Yet it often came with a cost. Part of that love goes to his romantic partners — Felice (Carol Schuler, “Skylines”) in his youth and Milena (Jenovéfa Boková, “Women on the Run”) toward the end of his life. He woos Felice into an engagement, then has an emotional affair with her best friend (Gesa Shermuly, debut). He decides to focus on his writing after years of heartbreaks, then begins a torrid love affair with his Czech translator Milena, leaving her feeling guilty when she cannot leave her husband for Kafka. He abandons his family home, then comes back again and again throughout his life. This constant movement within his relationships proves that nothing is stagnant for Kafka, a man in constant flux as he chases his ever-evolving desires.
Kafka, however, is not often able to translate his emotions, struggling to communicate his feelings off the page. In a particularly moving scene, Kafka’s sister Ottla (Katharina Stark, “Dead Girls Dancing”) reads his first impression of Felice, the woman he was to marry. Kafka describes the slope of her nose, the wrinkling of her blouse, the emotion she elicits in him. But he never says any of this to the woman herself. His sister explains directly to the audience that he loved the version of Felice he created; that by noticing all these details, by committing them to paper, he fell in love with an ideal conjured by his own mind — the place where he feels most comfortable.
This isn’t the only time a character breaks the fourth wall in “Franz.” Sometimes, Kafka fills in the gaps of his life for the audience. Sometimes, the other characters tell you what they really think of him, be they judgments on his anti-social tendencies or jealousy of his writing talents. They’re simple confessions, but Holland creates visual interest by giving the characters something to do. Whether it be laundry outside or paperwork in an ornate home library, the characters’ movements are one of the many ways the filmmaking flaunts its feathers while knocking down all barriers between art and artist, past and present: They’re pulled from their 20th-century mundanities to speak directly to a 21st-century audience, essentially turning the screen into a portal through time. What could easily amount to a disruptive motif becomes a gripping tool to advance the narrative’s closeness to Kafka. We know he doesn’t think much of himself, but knowing what others around him do is the only way to distinguish fact from the narratives built within the author’s head — something that Kafka is never able to escape.
Time blends together for Kafka in this film, as do reality and delusion. In the many moments spent searching for silence at his desk — something he craves because it is the only alternative to the cacophony of unpleasant thoughts — it’s disturbed by a noise no one in his time period can hear but the man himself: the chattering of 21st-century tourists and the screech of PA systems. The tweed clothes of his era immerse you in his world, as do the ornate furniture and the dingy walls. But the camera turns to the other side of his field of vision and shows us ourselves: today’s fans of his work walking through the Kafka museum. The set on the other side isn’t the cozy, pre-war workspace in his home — it’s a 21st-century museum full of tourists and tour guides talking about his life. Fluorescent lights, crowds in modern clothing, details of his life and posthumous publishing swirling about in the air like nails on a chalkboard. He knows nothing of the jeans-and-T-shirt future that haunts him. It’s too real, and too much for him.
Almost as frequently as these sequences are the visual illusions of his works brought to life on screen through graphics. He sees, quite vividly, the exact action of his short story “In the Penal Colony,” from the violence of the torture machine it discusses to the emptiness of its desert setting. He sees cockroaches and shadows of ravens before he sees us — the readers, the voyeurs of his life.
This voyeurism isn’t just metaphorical. This film doesn’t shy away from laying its characters bare — emotionally or physically. A scene in a brothel contrasts Kafka’s brutish, no-nonsense friend with the writer’s own much more romantic, tepid approach to intimacy. For him, it’s not about the mechanics of intimacy, but about the small moments of connection it offers. Instead of rushing to his own pleasure, Kafka spends long moments tracing the curves of a woman’s cheeks, staring deeply into her eyes — romancing a total stranger until she returns the affection.
Over time, his sensuality finds direction in deeper relationships, like the one he has with Milena, who understands him in every language. This is a woman to whom he wrote an entire book’s worth of love letters throughout his life, and we see her for less than one-third of the film. Her time isn’t wasted, though; she brings out a passionate side of Kafka that, by this point in the film, we think could be lost to his consumption. Even just before his death, Kafka had the spark of joy that modern audiences want to paint over with the image of the tortured artist we’ve invented. With Milena, it isn’t the pained caricature that comes alive, but the man himself.
This extraordinary spirit isn’t confined to the 42 years he walked the Earth. Franz Kafka lives on today through his work and his readers. Immortality is a curse that we’ve burdened him with, and in “Franz” he knows it even before we do. Kafka didn’t pass the treasures of his mind onto future generations willingly — we broke in and took them. We’re thieves in the night, and our victim has spotted us in the act, but he can’t get close enough to make us put his journals down. We can say the leather-bound words are worth more in our hands than decaying with their owner, but that doesn’t make our breaking and entering warranted. In his final moments, Kafka stares silently into the camera. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. Everything is communicated through his gaze; we may see him, but he sees us, too. Both sides must learn to reckon with that.
Daily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.
