Soderbergh Marathon: Part 10

Intro

Kafka (1991)
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) was an unexpected success, with a budget of only $1.2 million and a box office return of $36.7 million.  The screenplay, written by Steven Soderbergh himself, was nominated for an Academy Award.  As an independent movie, it also cleaned up at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, winning Best Feature, Best Director, Best Female Lead, and Best Supporting Actress.  Needless to say, Soderbergh was allowed to do whatever he wanted for his second feature.

Whatever he wanted turned out to be Kafka, which is supposedly a sort of biopic through a Kafkaesque atmosphere.  I say supposedly, because I am completely unfamiliar with Franz Kafka, the German writer who became famous posthumously, but was completely unknown when he lived.  I feel I'm at a bit of a disadvantage for this.

Of course, his job working in insurance while privately writing on the side with no fanfare was how Kafka spent his life.  I very much doubt the conclusion of this movie has anything to do with his life, but is probably lifted from one or more of his novels.  Again, I wish I had more familiarity with the author himself or the material he wrote.  As such, I do not feel like I'm the target audience for this movie.

Taken on its own terms, this is a very weird movie.  Again I can only assume it has the spirit of a Kafka novel.  The majority of the movie is in black-and-white and boy is it a beautiful looking movie.  I'd be inclined to recommend this purely for how good the movie looks.  The cinematography by Walt Lloyd, also his cinematography for Sex, Lies and Videotape, is excellent.  He won an Independent Spirit Award for his work for this movie.  Curiously, it's his last movie as a cinematographer for Soderbergh.

This is the first movie of Soderbergh's where I didn't really like the acting, although I'm not going to blame the actors.  Jeremy Irons plays Kafka, and he's competent, but he's also the straight man to everything weird that's going around him.  Soderbergh clearly intentionally wants some of his actors to be way over the top at acting and I don't know why.  You'll know if this is for you near immediately, as the very first scene acts as sort of a teaser to unfold the mystery and a guy is being chased and is very exaggerated with his movements.

Then there's "comedy" which consists mostly of twin brothers that don't look alike who are engaging in the broadest comedy imaginable.  It's not a major part of the movie, but it's very weird.  And not particularly funny to be honest.  A reviewer said it was "broad British comedy" so if you happen to know what that looks like, that's in this movie for some odd reason.

This is a movie that has its quirk for reasons, not just for the sake of weird quirks, and yet it's distracting all the same.  This is a movie that probably works very well if you're on the movie's wavelength.  It makes sense that this is considered a cult film to me.  Myself, I wasn't on the movie's wavelength, so I didn't like it that much.

He really swung for the fences on his second movie, and while it didn't work, it did help indicate where his career was headed, constant curveballs in what type of movies he makes.

2/4 stars