Alan Bennett meets Franz Kafka-not an unlikely meeting at all. Bennett's witty observations on bureaucracy photographed through a lens darkly lead us to the conclusion that we've suspected all along: Kafka was a realist. Opening amid the turbulence of 1945, the film flashes back to pre-World War I Prague and the Workers Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka spent his working life. Its great atrium and endless halls are filled with people "cast out of paradise" and awaiting compensation. There, a young man named Franz who suffers from a disfiguring skin disease (Dennis Potter territory) seeks not so much compensation as definition from the kindly Dr. Kafka (played by Daniel Day-Lewis). The diagnosis: a long, slow accident. Actuarially, one could live on for years-live to be hung from a lamppost, for example. Whether a worker in an asbestos factory or a Jew in Prague, one is guilty only of breathing in the wrong place.