Orson Welles’ modern interpretation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published eponymous novel, THE TRIAL opens with a pin-screen animation of the author’s parable “Before the law”, which encapsulates the keynote of his pessimistic take on the nature of our society’s involute law system: shutting down in front of any individual’s face with a false promise.
A young man Josef K. (Perkins) is under open arrest for an unspecific crime whose elusiveness never been clarified, a corporate manager, K. encounters various personages one after another (petting with Jeanne Moreau’s Miss Bürstner, his next-door lodger and a cabaret dancer, Romy Schneider’s sylph-like Lena, an enthrallingly enigmatic flirt, and Elsa Martinelli’s promiscuous wife of a court guard, female company is one thing K. doesn’t proactively seek for only naturally occurs to him), yet futility shadows him stalwartly when he galumphs through a concatenation of expressionist locations, including a byzantine courthouse (stood in by the abandoned Gare d’Orsay) and a vast computer technology company with umpteen, cookie-cutter files of desks and operating employees.
Visualizing Kafta’s recondite wording and cryptic non sequitur ought to be an oceanic challenge for any filmmaker, not to mention the inaccessibility of its dream logic, but Welles is a cracking visionary as well as a cinematic starchitect, configures and constructs vivid scenographic compositions across the European continent to psychoanalyze K.’s disintegrating frame of mind. The film consistently mesmerizes audience with its camera freewheeling in its nightmarish and labyrinthine sets, potently aided by the unorthodox Wellesian modus operandi (ultra close-ups, deep-focus compositions, astounding tableaux vivants and sharp chiaroscuro contrast) and a frenetic pace of montage orchestration, plus Abinoni’s neo-Baroque Adagio in G minor being put into magnificent auditory use, which, collectively, elicit a sublime cocktail of sensations: thrill, distortion, disorientation, hallucination and throbbing awe as if it is derived from a protracted bout of surreal somnambulism beyond one’s wildest imagination.
When K.’s galloping disillusion goes off the chart, he levels his frustration at the high-flying advocate Hastler (played by Welles himself with mischievous swagger), and the most radical act he can do is to dismiss the latter from his nonsensical case (during which Akim Tamiroff conveys a beguilingly equivocal irony between subservient and intentionally gnomic as one of Hastler’s client, Bloch), but he cannot run away from the deadly verdict of this invisible show trial of unknown authority, merely a cog in the machine, his denouement is foreshadowed.
With his career is on the crest of a wave, Perkins perkily gingers up K.’s self-absorbed downward spiral unto its nihilistic nadir with his boyish allure and aw-shucks sensibility, doing his very best to justify K’s unjustifiable, episodic streams of consciousness of fighting a losing battle, but not without lashing out an anti-Establishment diatribe before subjugating himself to fate with an attitude more than resignation. In the event, when Welles meets Kafka, THE TRIAL is preordained to be a sui generis conglomerate one can behold simultaneously with both wonderment and befuddlement.
referential entries: Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, 8.0/10); Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE (1960, 7.5/10)
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