Kafka (1991)

That was an excellent one.

Sick Product of a Sick System

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

(There are Spoilers) Dark and depressing movie about man's fight to keep his individualism in a world run and controlled by faceless and unfeeling bureaucracies. Franz Kafka, Jeremy Irons, has been quietly working as a clerk for a major government insurance company for almost nine years with the only person that he ever had a social relationship with being fellow clerk Edward Raban,Vladimir Gut. Edward had been secretly an active member of a revolutionary group that the secret police have been tracking and ends up dead floating in the Danube River.Kafka informed that Edward committed suicide by police official Gruback, Armin Mueller-Stahl, takes it upon himself to find out what really happened to his friend. Kafka gets in touch with Edward's girlfriend and fellow insurance clerk Gabriela, Theresa Russell, that has him ending up joining the anti-government group that the late Edward Raban and Gabriela are members of. Being a strong proponent of individualism himself Kafka fits right in with Gabriela and her fellow revolutionaries and become involved in overthrowing the government that he works for. A government that has enslaved him and his fellow workers by taking away their right to think for themselves. Where they eventually end up as a mindless mass of brainwashed zombies loyally obedient to every command, as senseless and ridicules as it is, that those in power give them.Kafka getting a promotion by his boss the chief clerk, Alac Guinness, that was supposed to go to his dead friend Edward. What he doesn't know is that he's being spied on by the two bumbling assistants that he's been assigned and that the government has already put him on their sh*t-list as a person who's ideas are dangerous to the state.It's later when Gabriela is fired from her job that Kafka realizes that the government, through it's secret police, is on to both him and the revolutionary group that he and Gabriela are members of. Thats when trying to track her down he finds this secret morgue that the government uses to store the hundreds of bodies of undesirables that it secretly murdered. Giving them false death certificates claiming that their deaths were due to natural causes.Determined to get to the bottom of what's going on Kafka makes his way into the Castle where all the records of everyone in the country are stored. It's there that he comes face to face with both the madman Dr. Murnau, Ian Holm,who runs the place and his biggest and most frightening nightmare.In the end Kafka goes back to his job as government clerk knowing that he as an individual can never defeat the massive and faceless bureaucracy that runs his, and the peoples, life. But through the power of the pen he can put his thoughts and ideas on paper and hopefully, when published, that will galvanize the people to rise up and tear down the bureaucracy that has taken away his, and the peoples, will as well as heart and soul.Franz Kafka would not live to see his 41th birthday dying on June 3, 1924. Unknown at the time of his death his writing have become the inspiration to many writers and philosophers over the years in informing the public about that dark cold and unfeeling world. A world that Kafka observed during his lifetime, 1883-1924, and was force to live and suffer in.

Considering the fact that Franz Kafka's work seeing the light of day was a result of a broken promise, because he never wanted his work or his persona to be known to the world, and on his death bed asked a friend to burn all of his work(but which instead decided to publish it), one could consider this film a further invasion of his privacy, and in a sense a blasphemy(setting him in the middle of his own work he never wanted to be published). On the other hand the result is not as surreal and claustrophobic, in black and white, European style movie, not inflicting damage on Kafka's work, making him the lead character in the diluted adaptation of his novel "The Castle", and is in a sense a tribute to the genius of Kafka's work. There couldn't have been a better choice for the lead role, but perhaps Terry Gilliam would have been a better choice to direct.Basically if you like the work of Kafka, you will like this movie, too, as it tries to capture the claustrophobic, surreal and absurd atmosphere of Kafka's work, although missing on the depth of it.

This is a strange creature: for a start, the first half is in black and white, then from a certain point the whole thing continues in colour. But more importantly, the real-life character of the writer, Kafka, has been bound up in an adventure story that he could have penned himself! The effect is of a whimsical, noire cartoon through which our hero stumbles, lost, for most of the time. But it is his bemused, everyday-ness which is his best defence against the hidden powers which are organised against him. In a way, it is disappointing when Kafka's paranoia is proved to be justified... the warped journey to this point is more fun than the pay-off. But this is a brave and playful film, at once terrifying and hilarious. The scene where the hero clumsily fights with an evil minion across the surface of huge magnifying glass, beneath which is a twitching, bloody brain undergoing maniacal experiments, is particularly bizarre, horrible and funny at the same time. 8/10

Kafka, a clerk at a Prague insurance firm, is upset when a friend mysteriously vanishes. Investigating the disappearance, he uncovers a group of terrorists trying to expose a secret police state where all non-conformists are kidnapped and murdered.This is a terrific mosaic of a picture; part biopic (Franz Kafka was a clerk, did not get on with his father, asked a friend to destroy his manuscripts and died of tuberculosis), part adaptation of Kafka's fiction (notably The Castle and The Trial), part homage to German expressionist cinema (Holm's character is called Murnau), and an enjoyably scary Gothic thriller with a great mad cast. Irons is a perfectly repressed hero, Russell is as gorgeous and intimidating as ever, Krabbe steals his scenes as a canny gravedigger, Mueller-Stahl is a copper from forties film-noir complete with razor-blade voice, Glover is an iconic villain and Allen and McBurney have a whale of a time as two pratfalling assistants. The script is a bit disposable, but it captures the essence of Kafka's nightmarish scribblings perfectly - hideous bureaucracy, impotent heroes, monstrous cabals, devious conspiracies and an overwhelming sense that truth and beauty are beyond our grasp. Shot in Prague in glorious black-and-white on fantastic period locations and stunning sets by production designer Gavin Bocquet. This is a great filmmaker's film - it's impossible to imagine it existing in any other form of expression, and it manages to be richly artistic but at the same time extremely enjoyable and completely lacking in pretension. Soderbergh is a bit of an enigma to me - this is a great movie, as is his subsequent film, King Of The Hill, but both bombed financially, whereas many of his later more commercial and critically-lauded movies are much less interesting. Check out Kafka though - it's got style, scares and terrific performances, and it's about the greatest paranoid fantastist that ever lived.