An oddly structured Kafka biopic

Director Agnieszka Holland subverts traditional biopic structure in Franz, a fragmented look at the life of Franz Kafka, the Czech author who died in 1924. Holland (Green Border) blends Kafka’s personal and aesthetic sensibilities with the quotidian aspects of a life that included a domineering father, loving relationships with his mother and one of his three sisters, and nondescript employment at an insurance company. Disregarding chronological order, Holland leaps about in time, offering ample references to Kafka's work. At various points, Holland shows Kafka imagining that his hands are webbed, a conceit he used in his fiction. These references sometimes feel forced, and it helps to be familiar with Kafka’s work if you want to catch them all. In one such unmistakable effort, Kafka’s father crushes a cockroach that has wandered onto the dining room table, a brash joke that points to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel in which a man becomes a giant insect. Raised in a German-Jewish…