The Trial

The Trial

Orson Welles (1962)

Orson Welles’s The Trial may be some distance away from Franz Kafka but this is a compelling and largely coherent revision of the book.   From the start, Welles imposes his own voice on the material, literally and brilliantly.  In a prologue, he reads Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ parable (which features in the novel, as Welles’s voiceover acknowledges).  The superb reading accompanies extraordinary animated illustrations, created by the ‘pin screen’ artist Alexandre Alexeïeff.   The lighting (by Edmond Richard) and the production design in what follows are hardly less impressive.  This updating of Kafka is set in a world both surreal and strongly contemporary:  there are images that express concentration camp deprivation and humiliation, of a totalitarian state living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.  The places of the film are remarkable creations – from the soulless apartment block in which Josef K lives and the surrounding waste land to the vast scale of his workplace, filled with hundreds of human cogs, and the packed, tiered courthouse for his trial.

The characterisations are less successful.  Casting Anthony Perkins as a trembling victim might seem a good idea in theory but he isn’t right as a rising bureaucrat – a man who had an ordinary life until the story began.  Perkins’s extraordinary physique means that, for all the ingenuity of the design, his K isn’t sufficiently oppressed by the architecture of his nightmare.  And he’s in such a neurotic lather from the start that it’s not surprising the agents of the state have come to arrest Josef K.  (This isn’t just the ghost of Norman Bates clinging to Perkins:  his dynamic twitchiness suggests K has a hundred guilty secrets.)   Welles changes the profession of K’s neighbour from the typist she is in the novel to a night-club entertainer but this doesn’t help Jeanne Moreau, who evidently doesn’t get the hang of what she’s meant to be doing.   Arnoldo Foà is subtly menacing as Inspector A but his sidekicks are screen heavies, their impact reduced by their familiarity.

31 July 2015

 

Author: Old Yorker