There are director’s cuts, special editions, redux versions – and then there’s Mr Kneff. Normally, a recut film is the prerogative of a film-maker who feels abused by the studio they worked for, or for whom a streaming platform has given the opportunity to enlarge on their “vision”; but this isn’t quite the case for Steven Soderbergh. In 1991 Soderbergh released Kafka, a tricksy fiction-slash-biopic, which – notoriously – managed to extract nearly all the heat from a film-making career that had got off to a stellar start with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh, though, is nothing if not a trier, and after years of tinkering, has completed Mr Kneff, a whole new version of Kafka, under a whole new title.
Mr Kneff isn’t exactly the Snyder Cut of literary biopics, in that Soderbergh hasn’t offered up a fan-service retrenchment of something that was apparently denied in the first place. What Soderbergh appears to have done with Mr Kneff is to follow his original inspiration for Kafka – make a film about the 1920s that resembles a film made in the 1920s – to its logical conclusion, as far as is humanly possible. Kafka, if you recall, stars Jeremy Irons as the author, working in an insurance office (as the real Franz Kafka did), getting entangled with a bunch of revolutionary anarchists who are staging bomb attacks in Prague, and finding his way to a mysterious “castle” where a super creepy Ian Holm is leading Brave New World-type experiments on human beings. Filmed in lush black and white (until the final section, where the film switches to a grim, sombre colour palette), and filled with Dutch tilts, pools of shadow and glowering Middle European gothic architecture, Kafka was (and is) a tour de force of silent movie homage. And whether or not he was wearing special makeup, Irons’ resemblance to the Ivor Novello of The Lodger is an eerily brilliant touch.
