\n\t\t<\/aside>\nThe 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\u2019s laughs aren\u2019t short and quiet \u2014 they\u2019re 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\u2019s a childlike fit that he throws, really, and that\u2019s at the core of who this character is. He can find joy, however small a sliver, even in situations he doesn\u2019t want to be in, a skill that many people spend lifetimes trying to master.\u00a0<\/p>\n
History would paint Kafka as a melancholic tortured artist \u2014 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\u00a0 \u2014 Felice (Carol Schuler, \u201cSkylines\u201d) in his youth and Milena (Jenov\u00e9fa Bokov\u00e1, \u201cWomen on the Run\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n
Kafka, however, is not often able to translate his emotions, struggling to communicate his feelings off the page. In a particularly moving scene, Kafka\u2019s sister Ottla (Katharina Stark, \u201cDead Girls Dancing\u201d) 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 \u2014 the place where he feels most comfortable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the only time a character breaks the fourth wall in \u201cFranz.\u201d 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\u2019re 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\u2019 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\u2019re 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\u2019s closeness to Kafka. We know he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s head \u2014 something that Kafka is never able to escape.<\/p>\n
Time blends together for Kafka in this film, as do reality and delusion. In the many moments spent searching for silence at his desk \u2014 something he craves because it is the only alternative to the cacophony of unpleasant thoughts \u2014 it\u2019s 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\u2019s fans of his work walking through the Kafka museum. The set on the other side isn\u2019t the cozy, pre-war workspace in his home \u2014 it\u2019s 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 <\/strong>jeans-and-T-shirt future that haunts him. It\u2019s too real, and too much for him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nAlmost 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 \u201cIn the Penal Colony,\u201d 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 \u2014 the readers, the voyeurs of his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This voyeurism isn\u2019t just metaphorical. This film doesn\u2019t shy away from laying its characters bare \u2014 emotionally or physically. A scene in a brothel contrasts Kafka\u2019s brutish, no-nonsense friend with the writer\u2019s own much more romantic, tepid approach to intimacy. For him, it\u2019s 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\u2019s cheeks, staring deeply into her eyes \u2014 romancing a total stranger until she returns the affection.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s worth of love letters throughout his life, and we see her for less than one-third of the film. Her time isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve invented. With Milena, it isn\u2019t the pained caricature that comes alive, but the man himself. \u00a0<\/p>\n
This extraordinary spirit isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve burdened him with, and in \u201cFranz\u201d he knows it even before we do. Kafka didn\u2019t pass the treasures of his mind onto future generations willingly \u2014 we broke in and took them. We\u2019re thieves in the night, and our victim has spotted us in the act, but he can\u2019t 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\u2019t make our breaking and entering warranted. \u00a0In his final moments, Kafka stares silently into the camera. He doesn\u2019t say anything. He doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at <\/em>mtobya@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Franz Kafka makes us feel seen. That\u2019s why I and millions of others have fallen in love with his work \u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[2055,1055,3157,3156,3158,642,172],"class_list":["post-3035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-age","tag-film","tag-franz","tag-german","tag-kafka","tag-modern","tag-shows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3037,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035\/revisions\/3037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}