The Trial (1962)

 

Director: Orson Welles

Screenplay: Pierre Cholot and Orson Welles

Based on a novel by Franz Kafka

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Josef K.; Jeanne Moreau as Marika Burstner; Romy Schneider as Leni; Elsa Martinelli as Hilda; Suzanne Flon as Miss Pittl; Orson Welles as Albert Hastler; Akim Tamiroff as Bloch; Madeleine Robinson as Mrs. Grubach

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

Adapting Franz Kafka's tale, in which a man named Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is charged for a crime he had no prior knowledge of and is never told the charge at all, The Trial opens with a prologue based on a passage from the text. Of a man who waits outside "the Doors of the Law", aging and dying whilst both never being allowed in and the guard to inform him the doors were for him only. Dreamlike and of an unknown subtext, director Orson Welles himself narratives over the evocative hand drawn illustrations of this miniature narrative by Alexandre Alexeieff, a melancholic and strange one apt for a Kafka adaptation.

As a director who continually evolved, Orson Welles here was in total exile from Hollywood, immediately changing to a new world in terms of cinema. Whilst this is a French-Italian-German production, I ended up thinking of Mickey One (1965), as much because both used jazz in their scores but because, the later an Arthur Penn production in Hollywood influenced by European cinema, both exist in abstract worlds where the leads are in continuous paranoia of unknown forces. In Mickey One, it was a young Warren Betty as a stand-up comedian; here, it was Anthony Perkins, a clerk who suddenly wakes up in his introduction with a police officer in his bedroom.

There is a huge distinction in casting Perkins. Tragically his career was shadowed by Psycho (1960) and Norman Bates, which is worse because that was an incredible performance in itself, but here you can see his talent. He is perfect as a Kafka character, the nervous twitch of a man confused by a world which is based greatly on misperception. It is certainly, undoubtedly, an idiosyncratic film, for were it not for the fact he would move to even more experimental work like F For Fake (1973) in the seventies, this would be Welles' proudly entering into abstract cinema. An eerie one, where Perkins' Josef K. finds himself pin ponged between unknown forces, from large courts which amass a crowd, to Welles himself playing Albert Hastler, an advocate who could help Josef were it not for the fact that these cases are endless, Josef eventually meeting old people, half dressed with numbers hung round their necks in a hall, he is effectively among. That Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), one of Hastler's clients, has been in his shadow for years, effectively part of his furniture sleeping in a spare room, emphasises eventually the Advocate is just a figure who toys with his clients.

The film has an inherently surreal nature to itself, but interlaces it with an oppressive tone from the opening scene, not only with Josef being woken up in bed but with other policemen in his room, trying to steal shirts from him as impounded goods and even his co-workers in the lounge. The world, through a very distinct script, is full of traps, where authority can (in this scene) try dominate Josef by claiming a word does not exist is one, to describe an oval marking on his bedroom floor from where a dentist's chair used to be, only to question when he talks of this word as if he said it first. That those police, who tried to steal his clothes, when he makes a charge of misconduct, find themselves in the broom closest of his work place being punished by whipping shows how perverse and dog-eat-dog this existence is.

In a world where there is seemingly no tangible authority, not even a precise explanation to how it works let alone why Josef is even on trial, the film is also befittingly strange in appearance. Shot in Italy, France and even Croatia, the architecture looms over Josef as one man in the centre, and the locations created for the film contribute as much for this. His work place is a vast hall of desks, his superiority only shown in having a raised platform for his desk, not even having walls. Environments at one point do bleed into each other. Some are created locations of dreams and nightmares, from winding and endless corridors of files on shelves, to a room where the floor is entirely covered in manuscripts and documents. Even some of the aspects dated of the early sixties now have an appropriately weird aesthetic, like a giant wall expanding computer the male engineers have naturally christened female like a boat.

That is before you considering the characters and the cast, populated in legendary French stars even in minor roles, from Jeanne Moreau as Marika, as Josef's next door neighbour or a tiny cameo by Michael Lonsdale as a priest. Romy Schneider, making her role in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) with Andrzej Żuławski merely an escalation, plays the maid and mistress to Hastler, who is attracted to guilty men and, for no reason, has webbed fingers on one hand which never becomes a plot point. Then there are specific characters, from Welles' corrupt figure of power, given his commanding voice and prescience, to a painter who specialises in commissions for the judges, already a figure with an eeriness to him as, predating Beatlemania, he is inexplicably hounded by young (teen) girls who would mob his home/work place, a merely cage of wooden pallets, if he had left the door open. There is a lot of explicit sexual and political layers, and flat out innuendo, including questions of Josef's behaviour such as the presumption, when his young female cousin visits as a sympathetic voice, that he is going to "corrupt" her. And Schneider, whose character of Leni is the other most prominent character, is at once fascinating if her own curious figure due to her fetish.

That is before the ending, rewritten by Welles as a co-writer, with unexpected death by dynamite. This is all in mind that, throughout, The Trial is still sombre, that its weirdness is contrasted by a sumptuous production with dread inducing atmosphere and exquisite dialogue, a melancholic conclusion as, by the time Welles himself in the end credits lists off the production crew in narration, he befittingly gave the author of The Metamorphosis both an alien yet profoundly atmospheric adaptation.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Paranoid/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium