Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum, specifically to inflame tensions in a NATO-member nation. As Holland’s film shows, Poland did not want them, and so these innocent people were terrorized by officers on both borders, driven into a small, unlivable area in between. Green Border caused a major stir in Poland, where it was denounced on the parliament floor as untrue and insufficiently patriotic. The film was a massive media talking point in that country, even leading to some death threats for its director. Given this political heat, no one could possibly blame Holland for choosing a less fraught subject for her follow-up.
But that is no excuse for Franz, as colossal a bellyflop as we’ve seen from a luminary director in several years. This is ostensibly a biopic of Franz Kafka (Iden Weiss), and the film does indeed touch on more or less all the turning points in his life: his conflict with his stern merchant father (Peter Kurth), his relationship with his doting sister Ottla (Katharina Stark), his professional rivalry with fellow writer and publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwartz), his strained marriage to a poor German, woman, Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), his abortive attempt to join the army during World War I, his decline from tuberculosis, and his eventual death. It’s all there, periodically interrupted by flashback scenes to little Franz failing to live up to his father’s masculine ideals. Franz is certainly thorough.
But it’s also overstuffed with absolute nonsense. Holland seemed to think that the cure for the common biopic was to include every cinematic trick she could think of, lifted from every unconventional biographical film she’d ever seen. We have historical personages speaking directly to the camera with metacommentary, just like in Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch. We have sudden anachronisms, like in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. There’s some overt Freudianism smuggled in from Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt, and a tendency to scramble time to demonstrate the pull of memory, like Michael Mann’s Ali. But interestingly enough, Holland’s opus never once resembles Kafka, Steven Soderbergh’s dreary second film. Maximalism is the order of the day here, and it retroactively makes one admire Soderbergh’s restraint, if nothing else.
In what is probably the single most misjudged choice in a film teeming with them, Holland frequently cuts to present-day Prague to show contemporary punters at the Franz Kafka Museum, sort of. Although there is indeed a Kafka Museum in Prague, the one Holland shows us is a bit more like Alex Ross Perry’s ersatz Pavement Museum. Unless, of course, you really can get Kafka Burgers there. (“Eat like Franz Kafka did!” a docent says.) There are also fairly explicit nods to 21st-century identity and sensibility, and because the tone of Franz is so scattershot, it’s genuinely impossible to tell whether Holland means them sincerely, or if they are ironically planted to make fun of the presentist tendencies of historical biography. Is the museum worker callow for comparing Kafka’s correspondence to emails and tweets? Are we meant to cringe at specific moments that suggest that Kafka was asexual, on the spectrum, and suffered from OCD? Or are these signposts actually meant to round out this opaque character for the contemporary viewer?
If Franz had adopted one, maybe two, of these disruptive techniques, it might have served a discernible critical purpose. But instead, Holland throws everything at the wall, and the dominant impression is that the director is shamefaced at the very idea of a biopic. But this doesn’t prevent her from giving us canned traumas meant to explain the torment in young Kafka’s soul, the first of which is a staging of the honest-to-God primal scene, as the boy is locked outside while his parents have sex, little Franz gazing through a peephole. On the other hand, Ottla’s quasi-incestuous fixation on her brother receives little if any response from Kafka. Genius that he is, he is far more bothered by his wife’s nattering about wallpaper.
In a film so stylistically diverse, it stands to reason that Franz would get something right, even if only by chance. Far and away the best scene in the film features Kafka presenting his story “In the Penal Colony” in public for the first time. Holland alternates between the scandalized audience at the reading and a cinematic staging of the climax of the story, when the narrator discovers the device that etches the name of the accused’s crime on their body with a pallet of foot-long needles. This moment, oddly enough, calls to mind Wes Anderson’s very successful short film anthology based on the writings of Roald Dahl. Holland might’ve taken the same road, combining a film about Kafka with a film of Kafka, reminding us why the author remains a literary titan. Alas, this is the only scene that attempts to visualize the writer’s imagination. Unless, that is, you count the two different moments when a character forcefully smashes a cockroach.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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