The Castle

 I dozed off during the first half-hour of Alexsey Balabanov's The Castle (1994).  When some loud noise on my TV screen roused me, I stopped the picture and scrolled backward to the last scene that I dimly recalled prior to falling asleep.  I watched the intervening sequences, maybe about six or seven minutes of the 109 minute movie.  But this didn't correct the problems that I was experiencing deciphering the frenetic action on screen.  Throughout the rest of the film, I had the sense that I was missing some particularly salient and dispositive plot point that, if seen and appreciated, would clarify the film's narrative.  Ultimately, I concluded that the missing information simply didn't exist and that, perhaps, faithful to Kafka's incomplete source novel, the fundamental pivot on which the story turns is excluded,therefy giving the events portrayed a strangely hapless and orphaned aspect.  In Balabanov's movie,  a vast number of things occur but it's impossible to really make any sense of these events.  Motivations are perverse or obscure and what we see suggests some larger story that remains occult.

The Castle is a very handsome film, full of grinning, simpering grotesques.  The people are pale to the point of looking like wraiths and they have peculiar physiognomies -- the only really normal-looking character in the movie is the Land Surveyor, a kid with reddish blonde hair who looks a little like Opie in the old Andy Griffith show.  Because of his tousle-headed good looks, the Land Surveyor is much in demand by the ladies in the peculiar garrison-village located beneath the castle.  I'm always surprised by the amount of sex in Kafka's novels.  The writer's heroes are continuously seduced by barmaids and the desperate daughters of small-time bureaucrats who offer sex in closets and under tables -- these women's lascivious advances are seemingly condoned by everyone in the community, although other female rivals for the Land Surveyor's  affections are conniving and dismissive of their competitors and seek to displace them in his affections.  (The women behave with baffling promiscuity but, whenever, someone criticizes them for this conduct, they retreat into prudish, hypocritical propriety.)  Essentially, the story of The Castle, to the extent that I can make it out, involves a series of sexual encounters resulting in farcical consequences:  much peeping through keyholes, half-naked people running down corridors or diving into snowbanks, doors being opened so suddenly that eavesdroppers are not merely knocked over, but in one case hurled off a balcony down to the floor fifteen feet below.  All of this occurs within several big structures made of huge ashlars like the outbuildings of an old 17th century fortress.  One of these structures is a tavern and inn, another seems to be sort of public bath (a banya) and, finally, near the end of the movie, the hero reaches a strange castle, in fact, a keep that is a high tower in the woods -- but this is not the castle sought by the Land Surveyor;  rather, it's the chateau of low-level, if pompous, bureaucrat who likes to go hunting.  Exterior shots show snowy landscapes, drifted knee-deep, and enormous angular ramparts that seem to run for hundreds of yards.  The place seems to be some kind of bastion erected by Catherine the Great or one of the other old Tsars and it consists of huge, sheer walls.  (These walls remind us of the Great Wall of China, one of the touchstones in Kafka's imagination, an immense obstacle that everyone is duty-bound to guard for obscure reasons, a vast fortifications defending an Emperor who may or may not exist.)  Everything about the movie is, more or less, admirable -- it has a vigorous, commedia dell' arte exuberance and there is something interesting in every shot.  But the whole enterprise is lifeless, inert, and disheartening.  The frenzied slapstick activity on screen has a macabre, marionette-theater aspect and, ultimately, the movie is so formless as to be very tedious.

So far as I could decipher the action, the Land Surveyor arrives alone at an Inn somewhere remote from a big shadowy castle.  (The castle is seen only in dream sequences as a black silhouette hovering over a high  jagged wall.  Beneath the wall, there is a frothing puddle of what looks like whipped-cream in which, toward the end of the movie, a big, haggard crow writhes -- "Kavka" is the Czech word for "crow.")  The industry in this village seems to have something to do with producing cylinders from which music is played when they are mounted in sound systems -- the cylinders seem to operate on the model of a player piano.  When the cylinders are played, people either sing rather tunelessly or dance on a small illumined stage, alternately choruses of black clad rather rabbinical-looking men or black clad floozies who kick up their legs and wiggle their rumps as if doing the can-can.  The communal room is lit by a round gas-fired chandelier which makes a continuous hissing and sputtering sound. The film's soundtrack consists of weird buzzings and humming noises, low rumbles, screams sounding in the remote distance, and grim puppet theater waltzes and polkas.  (If you shut your eyes, the film sounds like a David Lynch movie -- some of the mise-en-scene resembles Lynch but I think the more immediate influence is the great Russian director, Alexei German, a film-maker who was heavily influenced by Fellini and, indeed, features in his films goblin-like faces and violent action far more extreme than anything attempted by the Italian.)   The Land Surveyor is, at first, accorded great respect, but also his pleas to meet the Castellan who has retained him are ignored.  As it turns out, there are a series of Castellans and sub-Castellans in hierarchical orders and the Land Surveyor is only granted access to the bottom-most agents in this inscrutable bureaucracy.  As I have observed, the story involves a series of sexual encounters with women whom the Land Surveyors hopes can promote his introduction at the Castle.  The women are the mistresses of penny-ante officials with access to the castle and, so, the Land Surveyor hopes that they will smooth the way for him to be admitted to that place, but, of course, these affairs just entangle the hero in various complications and lead nowhere.  In fact, the husbands and boyfriends of these women encourage the Land Surveyor's intercourse with their women in hopes, it seems, the Surveyor will, somehow, be able to promote their careers -- at least, this is how I interpreted the peculiar nonchalance with which these officials respond to their women sleeping with the Land Surveyor.  I wrote several pages of notes as to the film's plot but can't decipher them.  There are a variety of named figures:  Frieda (the Surveyor's first girlfiend), Brunswick and his pale, half-comatose wife, Klamm, Barnabas, Pepi, a sinister school-master with a jaw that seems to be about a yard long and so on. But I wasn't able to decipher how they are related, although all of them seem to have something to do with supplying music-imprinted cylinders for the castle.  (The plot suggests that there are a vast number of other cottage industries associated with the Castle that may have their own hierarchies, snow-bound villages, and sexually voracious women -- for instance, maybe, on the other side of the Castle, there's a village devoted to supplying dairy products to the castle with its own equivalent set of characters.)  In the end, the Surveyor, whose services no one really wants, seduces Mrs. Brunswick in the hope that she can assist him in his quest.  As soon as he succeeds in this endeavor. Brunswick claims to be the Land Surveyor and forces the real Surveyor to assume his identity as the husband of Mrs. Brunswick.  It's not clear that Brunswick will prosper in this role, but it is certain that this change of identity signifies a disaster for the hero.  The final scene shows us a little boy, who recognizes the Land Surveyor and acknowledges his identity -- everyone else seems completely happy with the transformation of Brunswick into the Surveyor and vice-versa.  In fact, no one even seems to care.  The camera tilts up to show the strange suspended ring of fire and film fades out.  

The picture is replete with spectacularly ugly faces and uncanny gestures.  The Land Surveyor is given two assistants from the Castle who seem to be morons --  they grin and simper and are completely useless, that is, until one of them is shown in bed with one of the Surveyor's mistresses and, suddenly becomes, a ruthless and powerful figure who threatens his boss with a a beating.  Many scenes feature the Surveyor in bed with various people, including a strange scene in which the Surveyor lolls on the pillows next to an enormous bureaucrat.  There's a tall stone house with a door midway up the side accessed by the kind of  deadly-looking rock steps of the kind you see on a Mexican pyramid -- those steps are scary enough in the tropics let alone in this film in which they are always shown to be slick with snow and ice.  Characters whinny and prance like horses.  Old men and women sprawl in bathtubs that look like beer kegs.  Everyone is constantly darting about, shouting invective, tripping and falling in the snow.  But I couldn't keep the characters straight and was never able to figure out how they are related to one another.  It's a spectacular film in many ways but exceptionally rebarbative -- I  took notes and. still, couldn't figure the thing out and so I expect a casual viewer would be completely defeated by this picture.  What's disturbing to me is that I can't ascertain whether I have failed the film or it has failed me.