A biopic about a poet like Kafka should not loose its control over the different flavors of language but this might be the biggest flaw of this movie.
E.g. Listen to Max Brod's interviews on you tube (in German) and you will hear the special flavor of German-speaking Jews in Prague during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. English speakers may reference to the many interviews with Billy Wilder (given he was born in present-day Poland but spend part of his youth in Vienna) to get a feeling for this.
Ofczarek is great in his physical dominance has Kafka's father, but talks like a Viennese patriarch and not like a Jew living in Prague.
The lack of dialect coaches in European production has never been so evident as in this project. It is true that Kafka's prose is surprisingly free from dialect but we are talking here about non-fictionary scenes. Some of the smaller roles like the wounded soldiers in the scenes at the insurance are more convincing than most of the main actors.
The script was rather conventional as most of Kehlmann's recent works with its different approaches to reach the final end spiced up with some mildly absurd ideas: No, Kehlmann is no Schnitzler and if one has Musil to be played by a female actor to touch his latent bisexuality, a mustache is simply silly.
It could have come much worse but I hoped for it to be better than this,100 years after Franz Kafka's death.
E.g. Listen to Max Brod's interviews on you tube (in German) and you will hear the special flavor of German-speaking Jews in Prague during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. English speakers may reference to the many interviews with Billy Wilder (given he was born in present-day Poland but spend part of his youth in Vienna) to get a feeling for this.
Ofczarek is great in his physical dominance has Kafka's father, but talks like a Viennese patriarch and not like a Jew living in Prague.
The lack of dialect coaches in European production has never been so evident as in this project. It is true that Kafka's prose is surprisingly free from dialect but we are talking here about non-fictionary scenes. Some of the smaller roles like the wounded soldiers in the scenes at the insurance are more convincing than most of the main actors.
The script was rather conventional as most of Kehlmann's recent works with its different approaches to reach the final end spiced up with some mildly absurd ideas: No, Kehlmann is no Schnitzler and if one has Musil to be played by a female actor to touch his latent bisexuality, a mustache is simply silly.
It could have come much worse but I hoped for it to be better than this,100 years after Franz Kafka's death.
