Picassos La Mort dArlequin resides in the National Gallery of Art DC. The harlequin widely regarded as Picassos alterego is dead. Two spectral figures hover over him. Are they the harlequins loved ones come to mourn? Angels come to judge? Or perhaps they are the remnants of his subconscious come to reflect as the harlequin finally surrenders to his exhaustion. 420https://i.ur.com/DO7BA5J.png The painting I decided bears a striking resemblance to Kji Yamamurahttps://anilist.co/staff/101065/KojiYamamuras adaptation of Franz Kafkas 1917 short story A Country Doctor. Obviously there are the visual parallels. The art in both painting and short film is sketchy and rough and with bled out colours. Both pieces circulate around a sickly figure on his deathbed. And most importantly both the Picasso and the Yamamura adaptation can be viewed as snapshots of existential dread and nihilistic longing. They differ tonally however. Whilst La Mort dArlequin toes the line between tranquility and morbidity Franz Kafkas A Country Doctor is set firmly in the realm of the latter. In short the titular doctor is called on a nightly excursion sent to tend to a sickly bedridden boy. What ensues is a surreal nightmare of sorts as a weak and broken man despairs in a bleak and uncaring world. 420https://i.ur.com/AcXtX9q.png The visual design is pretty effective. The film includes these neat visual cues and motifs that add quite a lot to the narrative. For example as Rosa the servant girl implores the neighbours to lend the doctor a horse she literally knocks on the doors to their closed minds. Or how the characters body proportions actively shift and metamorphose as if in a carnival hall of mirrors. Its really unsettling. Limbs stretch and condense while heads bloat and swivel and are rung as literal bells that mockingly call the doctor into the night. What is a little unusual and perhaps another parallel to La Mort dArlequin are the two little spectres that hound the doctor and serve as our narrators. Your guess as to what they represent is as good as mine. Maybe they are the doctors subconscious. His id and superego if you will. 420https://i.ur.com/pAjKIkr.png They are soon joined by the two demonic horses that squeeze out of the doctors pigsty the recesses of his neglected libidinous self? in Pennywiselike fashion. It is here where we begin to witness the full extent of the doctors infirmity. The doctor tries to take control: I will take the reins. But he is immediately outdone by the young groom to whom the horses belong who proceeds to rape Rosa after sending the horses hurtling into the night with a mocking giddyup. It is apparent that the old man is as impotent as the barren landscape that surrounds him. The theme continues as the doctor is literally carried to the patients bedside by his family who emerge like clowns out of an undersized car. Doctor let me die the boy begs. If anything Franz Kafkas A Country Doctor is a little too relentless. It almost seems selfparodying at times and the incessant violin squealing is obnoxious more than unnerving. But its bold enough to the point that its undoubtedly interesting. And weird. Because what else is Kafka really? 420https://i.ur.com/QU1wAvf.png The film ends as the doctor broken and defeated retreats into the wilderness that is his battered consciousness and a spiritually defunct social landscape littered with fragmented body parts symbolic of the fractured self. There is a ubiquitous malaise it appears infecting all things. A sickness the doctor is unable to cure.