Movie Review: Transit

Transit **** / *****

Directed by: Christian Petzold.

Written by: Christian Petzold based on the novel by Anna Seghers.

Starring: Franz Rogowski (Georg), Paula Beer (Marie), Godehard Giese (Richard), Lilien Batman (Driss), Maryam Zaree (Melissa), Barbara Auer (Architect / Frau), Matthias Brandt (Barmann / Erzähler), Sebastian Hülk (Paul), Alex Brendemühl (Mexican Consul), Trystan Pütter (American Consul). 

 

The past and present co-exist is Christian Petzold’s Transit – a film that adapts a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers, and updates it to the modern day, without really changing all that much. It is a story about a Frenchman, Georg (Franz Rogowski) who barely escapes Paris, and makes his way to Marseilles – and wants nothing more than to get out of the country – but has no way of doing so – at least not until he realizes he can pose as a famous writer than the Mexican Consul has granted a visa to. He can do this because he was supposed to deliver a letter to the writer in his hotel room, and when he arrived, all he found was his papers, a bath tub full of blood – an apparent suicide. Now he has a way out – and only three weeks to wait until he can leave. But those weeks have a way of complicating things – first when he meets a young boy, Driss, and his mother – who have no hope of leaving, and want his help, and next when he meets Marie (Paula Beer), the wife of the writer his is currently pretending to be – and doesn’t reveal his secret. A love triangle of a sort develops between him, Marie and Richard (Godehard Giese), a doctor also on his way to Mexico – but it’s a fruitless love triangle, because Marie now realizes that she is in love with her husband – even though it was a letter from her dumping him that inspired the suicide she still does not know about. 

 

This is all fairly familiar territory for a WWII story – it’s not entirely unlike Casablanca, except none of its characters are all that noble. But Petzold doesn’t set the film during WWII – he sets in a kind of quasi-present. We see modern graffiti on the walls, electric cars on the road, and many other trappings of modernity – but tellingly, not computers or cellphones (perhaps because it would be too easy to figure out someone like Georg was lying otherwise). The result is strange and surreal – a Kafka-esque nightmare of the film that doesn’t really take place in the past or the present, but a strange combination of the two that never really existed. The current refugee crisis with everyone trying to flee into Europe is the ironic backdrop to this story, where everyone wants to get out, but no one can.

 

Because, ultimately, Transit is a story about people trapped in limbo – who say they want to leave, but never really go anywhere. The theme is made (probably too) explicit about halfway through when Georg is told a joke about a man who dies, and waits for years and years in an empty room waiting for someone to tell him his fate. When he finally sees someone and asks him, the other person replies “What do you mean? You’ve been in hell all this time”. At this point, and for the rest of the movie, poor dumb bastard Georg doesn’t really understand that the joke is about him.

 

The film embraces the melodrama at its core – like previous Petzold films Barbara and Phoenix – the film is built on coincidences, and has a plot built upon the fact that none of the characters can really be truthful with each other – if they were, the whole thing would unravel rapidly. The performances are all fine – Rogowski is excellent as the unknowing pawn in this game – Beer even better as Marie, full of regret and sadness. None of them know that their problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

 

Therein may lie the problem with Transit – what keeps it a very good movie, instead of a great one. Their problems don’t matter, they are merely pawns in this game and they don’t even know they are playing. The film remains more of an intellectual exercise than anything else – and lacks the masterful final moment of Phoenix that transformed that film into something greater. It’s still very good – another excellent film for Petzold. When something is this ambitious and complex, it’s seems odd to complain too much.