When I was growing up in Honolulu in the 1970s, my mom often took me to strange movies that my young brain really had little chance of comprehending. Orson Welles’ version of the Franz Kafka short story “The Trial“ (starring Anthony Perkins) was one such film. I recall seeing it as a confusing melange of black and white ambience mixed with histrionic and screaming faces.
That would be my first exposure to the work of the famed Czech author, probably most famous for penning the “man turns into a cockroach” story “The Metamorphosis.“
I was dimly aware that Steven Soderbergh, fresh from his debut of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape“ in 1989, created what I assumed was a kind of biopic of Kafka in the early 90s. It was titled appropriately, “Kafka.”
I watched it recently and decided that the term “biopic” is stretching it. The movie is more the existentially tormented author reimagined as a kind of James Bond. In the movie, Kafka (played by Jeremy Irons) falls in with a band of anarchists and unveils a secret plot emanating from the government bureaucracy holed up in Prague Castle. After various cat and mouse activities worthy of an Ian Fleming spy novel, the Kafka character breaks into the castle, and cacophony ensues.
It’s an intriguing movie, at times erudite and comedic, but with only a tangential connection to historical reality.
Much like the real Kafka, the film’s version of him grapples with the upheavals of modernity—the late 19th- and early 20th-century world of industrialization, sprawling bureaucracies, Freud’s theories of the unconscious, and wars that claimed millions of lives. Many at the time wondered whether such progress was coming at the cost of human dignity. (Some still do.)
Alec Guinness—old Ben Kenobi himself—has a role in the film as a supervisor at the insurance company where Kafka toils at a desk. (I was struck by how little work has changed since that era—most of us still toil for 8-10 hours, seated at desks.)
The film is largely shot in black-and-white, though it switches to color at one point where I presume the story enters modernity.
It’s a weird but fun watch.
