Kafka (movie 1991)

So as a teenager I got interested in Kafka.  Which I suppose is common to pretty much anyone that would ever get interested in Kafka.  I found out about this movie called Kafka when I was 23 & me & the girl I was living with had switched video stores after a run-in with her ex-boyfriend where we normally rented.  The new video store had this sitting on an end cap for some reason, but she’d already seen it & I think we ended up renting some bad horror movie instead.  I pretty much never fell into a period of life where I regularly rented movies since then, so I’d forgotten all about this & of course it is not a movie that appears on TV.

So YouTube recommended this one to me.  I am still confused by what movies are there in their entirety & the legality of it & the moral implications of me watching them, but I watched it all the same.  It’s mostly in black & white & mostly an homage to Orson Welles version of The Trial (which is awesome if you’ve never seen it), but makes a lot of references to other works by Kafka (The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, The Castle) & also has a vibe that reminds me of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.  I really enjoyed this movie, but I’m not sure who I would recommend it too.  It’s slow & boring & yet intricate enough to easily lose track of what is going on – which I suppose is true of Kafka’s stories in general as well.  I suppose if a movie based on Kafka’s stories translated into a biography sounds good to you, you’ll enjoy this.  It does have good cinematography & acting & I can’t think of a way it fails at being what it tries to be.