Kafka *** (1991, Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell, Joel Grey) – Classic Movie Review 2138

Director Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious and intriguing 1991 follow-up to his sensationally successful 1989 worldwide indie hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape is a murky mystery thriller about author Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) getting caught up in a strange situation that could have come straight out of one of his stories. Seemingly a biopic of the life of Kafka, actually the film sets out to blur the line between biographical fact and Kafka’s fiction, notably of course his masterworks The Castle and The Trial, creating a fantasy Kafkaesque atmosphere. 

It is set in 1919 just after World War One in Prague, where Kakfa was born on July 3 1883, and the plot concerns Kafka’s day job as an insurance company worker who gets involved with an underground group after one of his co-workers is murdered. The group, responsible for bombings across town, tries to stop a strange secret organisation controlling the major events in society. Kafka penetrates the organisation to confront its members at the climax of the plot that unravels against a background of mysterious disappearances, creepy castles, trials and escaped lunatics.

The film’s tone and look are similar to Terry Gilliam’s Kafkaesque nightmare Brazil, though the Ian Holm role as chief clerk in that film is played here by Alec Guinness, while Holm here is now a bigger villain as Dr Murnau.

Brazil is mixed with a hint of German Expressionism, most notably references to Fritz Lang and obviously F W Murnau (Nosferatu), and a story structure recalling Wim Wenders’s Hammett. That’s a lot of homages to pay in one movie.

Irons is a strong, tormented central presence, while Holm, Guinness, Jeroen Krabbé as Bizzlebek, Theresa Russell as Gabriela, Joel Grey as Mr Burgel, Armin Mueller-Stahl as Inspector Grubach, Brian Glover as Castle henchman and Keith Allen  as Assistant Ludwig do their best with the film’s odd black humour and weird bursts of occasional slapstick comedy. But there is not enough meat for the actors to get their teeth into in Lem Dobbs‘s screenplay, and the superb cast is not always well used in what, apart from Irons, is virtually only a series of cameos.

Kafka is always intriguing, and made with considerable imagination and tender loving care, as you’d expect with Soderbergh, but it quite doesn’t involve you or haunt the mind and imagination as it really should. It was the first of a series of low-budget box-office disappointments from Soderbergh, but it has since been re-evaluated and become a slight cult film.

Also in the cast are Robert Flemyng (Keeper of the Files), Simon McBurney, Emil Wolk, Vladimir Gut, Toon Agtenberg and Maria Miles.

It cost $11million and took $1million back at the box office. It is still bugging Soderbergh, In 2013 he said that the film’s rights had reverted to him and executive producer Paul Rassam and that work had begun on a completely different version of the film. He and Lem Dobbs did some rewriting, inserts were shot during the making of Side Effects and he plans to dub the film into German and release both the original and new version together. As this suggests, there is a better  film trying to get out from the 1991 Kafka.

Orson Welles filmed The Trial in 1962 and Michael Haneke filmed The Castle in 1997.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2138

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