Mark Reviews Movies: TRANSIT (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2019

Even before the plot proper begins, Transit announces itself as a daring film. The story comes from Anna Seghers' 1942 novel of the same name, about a man on the run in Nazi-occupied France after he escapes from a concentration camp. The film's story basically remains the same, and for a while, one might be fooled into thinking that writer/director Christian Petzold has made an adaptation that also stays true to the novel's time period.

The characters are dressed in a manner—in plain clothing, such as suits and dresses, with bulky coats—that does not specify a given time. Indeed, there's a shot of a passport, which announces that it comes from the "German Reich" on the cover.

For the entire time we might be thinking that this is the 1940s, though, something feels off. The background details don't appear period-appropriate. One might note the cars, and one will definitely notice that, when our protagonist is almost detained by the police, the officers are wearing decidedly modern uniforms—full riot gear with contemporary bullet-proof vests and helmets.

The gradual revelation that this is not the past is subtly terrifying. We no longer have the safety of knowing that we are watching a historical tale. We're watching a contemporary one. The only safety is the knowledge that Germany has not gone back to its fascistic ways, although that seems like only a minor comfort, when so many politicians across the world have drifted toward the politics of exclusionary authoritarianism.

Petzold doesn't give us an easy out with this material. The film may be set in an alternate present or a potential future, but he refuses to engage in any sort of science-fiction explanation or details that might give away that his story is taking place at a later date.

He provides neither the safety nor the comfort of some sort of distancing gimmickry or imaginative futurism. Through the establishment of this world and the urgency of the storytelling, Petzold is clear about his intentions: This is a tale of the here and now. To become involved in the tale is to accept this basic fact. To accept that is to come to a reckoning with the idea that such a world of the current or not-too-distant present is possible.

With the current state of politics and the world, accepting the premise is all too easy. That makes the reckoning even more discomforting, especially given how the entire story is a claustrophobic nightmare about being trapped in such a system—with the means of escape being a bureaucratic nightmare unto itself.

This is an inherently political film, but its politics are weaved so tightly into the story that it's more allegory than polemic. That story involves Georg (Franz Rogowski), a German man who has escaped the fascism that took over his country to Paris—only for German forces to begin an invasion of France. They're taking over parts of the country on a steady path toward the capital.

A friend offers Georg some money and a seat in a car to Marseilles if he delivers a pair of letters to a writer hiding in a local hotel. Upon arriving there, Georg discovers that the writer had committed suicide a few day prior. Taking the writer's possessions and with the Germans arriving in Paris, Georg makes an escape to Marseilles.

Alone and without the appropriate papers to hide for long, Georg decides that he might receive a finder's fee for bringing the writer's possessions to the Mexican consulate, since they offered the dead writer asylum in one of the letters. While there, Georg is mistaken for the dead man, and seeing an opportunity to flee a falling Europe, he does not correct the error.

The plot, then, is simple, as Georg maneuvers through the bureaucracy of travel visas and transit papers with an assumed identity, but this isn't a story about its plot. For a while, Petzold's screenplay is more concerned with the despairing routine of this situational prison. As Georg visits a local café and two consulates (the Mexican one and one for the United States in Marseilles), his attention is briefly drawn to but never distracted by others in a similar position.

There's a Jewish-German woman (played by Barbara Auer), who is watching two dogs that belong to an American couple, although the animals that might help her gain passage out of Europe are draining what little money she has left. A conductor (played by Justus von Dohnányi) has a job with an orchestra in Mexico waiting for him, but Georg is too frustrated seeing his circumstances in the man's own to truly listen to his story. The closest he comes to connecting in an honest and meaningful way is with Driss (Lilien Batman), the young son of a refugee who died along the way to Marseilles with Georg, but such a bond can only get in the way when his ultimate goal is escape.

We know the inner details of Georg's thinking because Petzhold provides a narrator: a man who notices Georg in the café and communicates his story after it has come to its conclusion (We gradually realize the depressing dramatic irony of this storytelling device). It's the sort of narration that doesn't explain (The scenario is simple enough that it doesn't need explanation) but, instead, illuminates the terrible toll on Georg's psyche and humanity—finding himself one among countless in a prison of paperwork and waiting, as he discovers that his empathy for those like him is a source of torment.

The actual plot is a love triangle, involving Marie (Paula Beer), the wife of the writer whom Georg is impersonating (She doesn't know this), and Richard (Godehard Giese), a doctor who is also Marie's lover. The complication is that Marie can only escape with the help of her husband, whom she still believes to be alive and in Marseilles, but the complexity of these relationships is in how each of them wants something, which often conflicts with the others' or their own aims.

Petzold has crafted a quietly devastating story about the dehumanizing qualities of war, of certain (and sadly still thriving) politics, of bureaucracy, and of the damned hell of waiting for the uncertain. While Transit comes from a 77-year-old story, it remains bleakly relevant today, and in this particular and modern re-telling, Petzold reminds us that such stories will always be with us.

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