{"id":117525,"date":"2025-09-15T10:57:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=117525"},"modified":"2025-09-15T10:57:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:57:50","slug":"scrutiny-tiff-2025-agnieszka-hollands-franz-delves-enigmatic-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2025\/09\/15\/scrutiny-tiff-2025-agnieszka-hollands-franz-delves-enigmatic-author\/","title":{"rendered":"SCRUTINY | TIFF 2025: Agnieszka Holland\u2019s Franz Delves Into The Enigmatic Author"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A scene from director Agnieszka Holland\u2019s Franz, which screened at TIFF 2025 (Photo courtesy of TIFF)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You\u2019ve got to hand it to Agnieszka Holland, the veteran award-winning director who spent a formative portion of her cinema life in the Czech Republic, the home of Janacek, Dvorak and Kafka.<\/p>\n

Many people have aspired to make a film about Franz Kafka but the few attempts \u2014 Steven Soderbergh\u2019s misfire Kafka (1991) in particular \u2014 have made a mess of it. The mistake is in conflating the writer\u2019s phantasmagoric tales with his mundane reality. Merging the two is impossible.<\/p>\n

Franz Kafka himself attempted it in his life, and failed.<\/p>\n

Working for an insurance company by day while writing bizarre visionary tales by night is hardly the stuff of great cinema. But Holland saw something else in Kafka\u2019s life, the man behind the polite, nearly blank mask.<\/p>\n

While affecting an objective tone, her direction and the script by Marek Epstein for Franz is clearly sympathetic towards someone of profound inner feelings who tried to make his way in the world with the least amount of fuss and bother. The film emphasizes the author\u2019s difficulties with his father, an overbearing but immensely successful businessman, who never understood his son.<\/p>\n

Kafka, The Man<\/h3>\n

Holland\u2019s film, though occasionally strident and definitely arty, does convey Kafka\u2019s situation rather precisely. While his father was a hard man to like, Franz Kafka did have three sisters who loved and supported him emotionally, especially Ottilie. The film makes that clear, and also shows that he derived enjoyment from his group of writer friends, which included the talented and successful Max Brod and Franz Werfel.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that the sober persona that Kafka adopted didn\u2019t conceal his dark wit from his friends. The film follows the historic record, mainly chronicled by Brod, which related that Kafka\u2019s darkest fantasies were considered to be immensely funny to his friends during his lifetime.<\/p>\n

In a brilliant scene, Kafka reads one of his stories, In the Penal Colony, which Holland illustrates in excruciating detail. Here, she changes the film\u2019s tone, allowing for the gruesomeness of Kafka\u2019s vision to come to the forefront.<\/p>\n

She shows that the audience\u2019s response to such a tale was marked by as much rejection as acceptance. It\u2019s made understandable that Kafka\u2019s writing might have been acclaimed by some, but his work was hardly a public favourite during his lifetime.<\/p>\n