Steven Soderbergh`s ”Kafka” is a surprisingly cold, gray and flavorless follow-up to ”sex, lies and videotape,” Soderbergh`s 1989 debut feature and one of the most popular independent films ever made.
”Kafka” is about an indistinct individual, played by Jeremy Irons, who works in a Prague insurance company and appears to have written some of the literary works associated with the celebrated writer Franz Kafka, with whom he otherwise has little in common-and certainly not his wit, spirit or poetic intelligence.
This Kafka is a shuffling, timorous, blandly beaming figure who, because he is attracted to a beautiful, aloof co-worker (Theresa Russell), begins looking into the mysterious disappearance of a mutual friend.
He is helped and/or hindered by a cast of international guest stars, including Joel Grey as a nosy bureaucratic functionary; Jeroen Krabbe as a street person with advanced literary tastes; Armin Muller-Stahl as a canny police detective; Alec Guinness as a self-important chief file clerk; and Ian Holm as a sinister doctor who, for no reason the movie makes clear, has been named after the great German silent filmmaker, F.W. Murnau.
It`s all reasonably ”Kafkaesque,” in the way that now-banal adjective gets applied in casual conversation to any experience of bureaucratic confusion. But it has none of Kafka`s analytical thrust, none of his sense of the pain and horror of personal relationships, and none of his mystery. What could be less genuinely Kafkaesque than a whodunit in which we find out who did it?
For the young Soderbergh, the black-and-white ”Kafka” might seem as much a tribute to the baroque visual style of Orson Welles (as displayed in his own Kafka adaptation, ”The Trial”) as ”sex, lies, and videotape” was to the classical limpidity, both visual and dramatic, of Eric Rohmer.
But Soderbergh and his talented cinematographer, Walt Lloyd, both seem to lose interest in the bizarre camera angles and menacing shadows with which the film opens, slipping into a blandly televisual style as the movie wears on. Even Prague, where the movie was filmed on location, comes to look
disappointingly ordinary, as if it were a suburb of Oklahoma City with a few more hills to its credit.
Irons, who can be a brilliantly inventive performer, seems adrift in an underwritten part, which offers little or nothing to engage his creativity. Theresa Russell is, again, an attractive but ponderous presence, who tends to weigh things down just when they need to be lightened up.
Soderbergh does save some juice for the film`s surprise finale, though the sudden shift in tone and style adds little and comes much too late. For the true spirit of Kafka, it would be hard to beat Karel Kachyna`s dark and gripping ”The Ear”-a long-banned Czech production of 1968 that has recently been making the museum rounds-and indeed, Soderbergh does not.
”KAFKA”
(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Lem Dobbs; photographed by Walt Lloyd; production designed by Gavin Bocquet; music by Cliff Martinez; produced by Stuart Cornfield and Harry Benn. A Miramax Films release; opens Feb. 7 at the Fine Arts Theater. Running time: 1:28. MPAA rating: PG-13. Adult situations, violence.
THE CAST
Kafka………………………………………………Jeremy Irons
Gabriela…………………………………………Theresa Russell
Burgel………………………………………………..Joel Grey
Dr. Murnau……………………………………………..Ian Holm
Bizzlebek………………………………………….Jeroen Krabbe
Inspector Grubach………………………………Armin Muller-Stahl
The Chief Clerk…………………………………….Alec Guinness
