After watching two conventional screen adaptions - by Rudolf Noelte (1968) and Michael Haneke (1997) - I was well prepared to appreciate the very different and much more cinematographic approach by Aleksey Balabanov. It's not a drab study in futility and paranoia, but a colorful grotesque with lots of strange new ideas added to the original story. That's not to say he disrespected the source material, some details in his movie are actually better than in the two afore-mentioned ones. Complementary to the strangeness of Kafka's novel, he created an entertainingly surrealistic atmosphere. The Surrealism and the book were both born in the 1920s, so I'd like to call this addition age-appropriate.
Of the three screen adaptions, this one features the best snow-covered landscape, the best locations, the best art direction, the weirdest people, by far the most people and the youngest leading actor. This is not a musical, but there is a lot of music and singing going on, mostly in the busy backgrounds. But even if this movie version of a Kafka book is more pleasant than others and could be enjoyed by quite a few viewers, this "Fun with Kafka" has of course the emphasis on "Kafka" not "fun".
As for Kafka purists ... The funniest joke about Kafka is that some people actually think that he had access to divine wisdoms and truths. So they get into the loop of reading and interpreting his books over and over again, always ending in some kind of frustration, because Kafka's writings are as hermetic as a well oiled bureaucracy. But that's what being "Kafkaest" is all about - stubbornly looking for truth in all the wrong places. And that's funny.
The last 15 minutes are not from any Kafka script I know of. It seems to be a new, original and appropriately enigmatic ending to Kafka's fragmentary, end--less story. 8/10.
