K

K

Hong Kong, 2015, colour, 1.85:1, 88 mins.

Directors: Emyr ap Richard, Darhad Erdenibulag.

Rating: 3/10.

Pointless, dramatically flat adaptation of Kafka’s novel The Castle, relocated to northeast Asia.

STORY

A remote, Mongolian-speaking village, somewhere in Asia, the present day. After losing his way, K (Bayin), a land surveyor, arrives in the village. At the Bridge Hotel, he’s told by the truculent Schwarzer (Agu), the son of a Castle official, that he needs a permit to stay. K insists that he has been invited by the Governor, who lives in the Castle, and is eventually allowed to stay. As the hotel is full, some maids are turfed out of a room to give him somewhere to sleep. The next day K’s two assistants, Artur (Altanochir) and Jeremias (Zandaraa), arrive. K also receives a message from the Castle via Barnabas, the Messenger (Nomindalai), who says he is the liaison between him and Minister Klamm, his Castle contact. K goes to Barnabas’ home and meets his parents, younger sister Amalia (Ariuna) and older sister Olga (Yirgui). Hoping to meet Klamm in person, K accompanies Olga to a party at a hotel that is used only by Castle officials. There he meets Frieda (Jula), a barmaid who claims to be Klamm’s mistress. Though Klamm is somewhere in the hotel, K never meets him, and ends up sleeping with Frieda. Next day K meets the Mayor (Oyunsang), who says he has no need of a land surveyor; due to a bureaucratic mix-up, K’s invitation was never cancelled. But he offers K a replacement job as a school caretaker. K, Frieda, Artur and Jeremias all sleep at the school that night. Next day K still cannot get to Klamm or gain access to the Castle.

REVIEW

An adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1926 novel The Castle, updated to the present and set in a Mongolian-speaking village, K ends up as pointless as it’s dramatically flat. Using just a small selection of the original’s characters, and set almost entirely in a series of drab hotel rooms, the script by Welsh-born, Inner Mongolia-based Emyr ap Richard provides no compelling reason for the remake, which lacks any sense of tension and is only partly redeeemd by a strain of dry humour. Kafka’s unfinished novel was a surreal take on the individual within a totalitarian, bureaucratic society; K is more like a footnote, stripped of any complexity and hardly justifying its existence with any original viewpoint.

The film is the second feature by 33-year-old ap Richard, a freelance photographer, writer and English-Mongolian translator, and Darhad Erdenibulag, 36, an Inner Mongolian documentarian, who previously co-directed The First Aggregate Tabun mahabuda (2012), about an injured stuntman who finds himself offered an acting job. Both seem to have gone for a deliberately unatmospheric look, with plain, muted photography of interiors by French d.p./editor Matthieu Laclau that’s very different from ap Richard’s carefully lit photography for Aggregate. (Laclau’s previous work includes co-editing Mr. Tree Hello！树先生 [2010] and A Touch of Sin 天注定 [2013], both produced by Mainland director Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 via his Xstream Pictures, as here.) However, the result, amplified by heavy use of medium shots, is simply flat and on-a-budget, unsuited to the subject matter.

Performances are somewhat livelier, with Bayin as a mop-haired K who seems just as happy to sleep with a hotel waitress as find a way out of his Kafka-esque dilemma, and actress Jula making a lively companion as a hotel barmaid. As K’s two idle assistants, Altanochir and Zandaraa also provide some dry humour. But the point of the whole exercise remains doggedly elusive – and even at 88 minutes, way too long. The film was shot around Hohhot, Inner Mongolia province, China.

CREDITS

Produced by Xstream Pictures (HK) (HK).

Script: Emyr ap Richard. Novel: Franz Kafka. Photography: Matthieu Laclau. Editing: Matthieu Laclau. Art direction: Emyr ap Richard, Darhad Erdenibulag. Costumes: Yang Junyi. Sound: Zhang Yang, Zhang Shenqin.

Cast: Bayin (K), Jula (Frieda), Yirgui (Olga, Barnabas’ older sister), Altanochir (Artur, K’s assistant), Zandaraa (Jeremias, K’s assistant), Nomindalai (Barnabas, the Messenger), Ariuna (Amalia, Barnabas’ younger sister), Agu (Schwarzer), Urinshaa (landlady), Norbu (landlord), Oyunsang (mayor).

Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Forum), 7 Feb 2015.

Release: Hong Kong, tba.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 8 Feb 2015.)