Taglines: The romanting portrayal of the celebrated Czech author Franz Kafka, and his last love.
The Glory of Life movie storyline. Because of the power of love, the last year of Franz Kafka’s life becomes his happiest. He has never before been able to allow himself to experience intimacy, he suffers from tuberculosis and is dependent on his overbearing family. But the worldly wise Dora Diamant accepts him as he is. And he accepts her.
The two meet in 1923 on the Baltic Sea coast, where he is convalescing and she is working in a Jewish Volksheim. Together they go to Berlin and, when Franz’s health deteriorates rapidly, to a sanatorium in Austria. Barely a year after they meet, he dies. The memory of their time together will shape Dora for the rest of her life.
The Glory of Life (German: Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens) is a 2024 German drama film directed by Judith Kaufmann and Georg Maas from a script written by Maas, Michael Gutmann and Michael Kumpfmüller based on Kumpfmüller’s 2011 novel of the same name. An international co-production between Austria and Germany, the film stars Sabin Tambrea and Henriette Confurius as Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant, respectively. The Glory of Life was released in Germany on 14 March 2024.
Film Review for The Glory of Life
Many succinct attributes can be found for the film adaptation of Michael Kumpfmüller’s novel about the love between Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant in the last year of his life, „Kafkaesque“ is not one of them. Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann are not interested in psychologizing Kafka in their joint directorial work, which is based on a screenplay by Maas that he wrote with Michael Gutmann.
They are not looking for images that correspond to the writer’s oppressive work, that establish a connection between his works and his life. Rather, they are interested in visualizing a love story whose tragic end is already certain when it begins, a love story whose time runs out – and which is told so centrally and on such a grand scale, in Kaufmann’s exquisite images and with the precise editing work of Gisela Zick and Hansjörg Weißbrich, that the myth of Kafka begins to disappear behind the man Kafka.
The fact that the lovers are the aforementioned monolithic writer and Dora Diamant is a crucial detail that provides the framework for the historically documented plot filtered through a fictional story, but it is only a detail that lends the film a special urgency. It is a strong premise for a movie, a love against all odds that begins with a chance acquaintance on a beach on the Baltic Sea, between two people who seem so opposite that you don’t quite know how they could ever have a conversation.
And yet they sense that they are made for each other, the dreamy Kafka, who always seens to float above it all, his feet barely touching the ground, and finds words for his desperate world view like no other, and the prudent Diamant, a modern young woman at a time when female rebellion is met with skepticism and even rejection.
Sabin Tambrea and Henriette Confurius are ideally cast for the two main roles, appearing in a way that only movie stars can, always solid and at the same time a bit like beings from another planet. This is of crucial importance in making the story of „The Glory of Life“ work.
The two directors get very close to the central characters, but not always so close that the film can completely free itself from the accusation of being a tad old school, maybe a bit stuffy. The images have an exquisiteness, the costumes (Tanja Hausner) and set design (Katharina Wöppermann) a precision that corresponds to the authenticity of the era, the time between the two great wars, but also runs the risk of appearing to be a means to themselves and suffocating the life of the plot.
The actors are particularly important here. And they always appear finely and carefully directed, able to shape and lend contour to two famous names. Apart from Tambrea and Confurius, only Manuel Rubey plays a somewhat substantial role as Kafka’s best friend Max Brod, to whom, as we now know, we owe the fact that we ever got to read the writer’s work at all. Before his death, Kafka had instructed him to destroy all the author’s manuscripts, who had been largely unpublished until then – Brod decided against it.
“The Glory of Life“, produced by the German Tempest Film in co-production with the Austrian Lotus Filmproduktion, is cinema that doesn’t shout out the glory of life, but tells it with fine brushstrokes and in a classic form – if you want Kafka to be crazier and more gaudy, you can currently access David Schalko’s mini-series co-written with Daniel Kehlmann and starring Joel Basman as Franz Kafka. However, an older audience may prefer this version, which is perhaps sometimes a little staid and somewhat stiff, but always worth seeing, masterclass cinema with a starched collar and good manners.
The Glory of Life (2024)
Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens
Directed by: Judith Kaufmann, Georg Maas
Starring: Henriette Confurius, Sabin Tambrea, Manuel Rubey, Daniela Golpashin, Alma Hasun, Peter Moltzen, Michaela Caspar, Mia Klein Salazar, Mira Griesbaum, Ida Streicher, Liv Adam
Screenplay by: Georg Maas, Michael Guttmann
Cinematography by: Judith Kaufmann
Film Editing by: Gisela Zick
Art Direction by: Katja Clos
Makeup Department<: Regina Breitfellner, Martha Ruess
Music by: Paul Eisenach, Jonas Hofer
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Majestic Film, TrustNordisk
Release Date: March 14, 2024 (Germany)
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