Transit

Here we have a German (dissident?) fleeing the Germans (?) who are invading WW2 (?) France - but it's happening now with 2019 cars and modern police uniforms and weapons etc. Keeps you guessing till you realise the themes of oppression, appeasement, looking the other way, denial and so on are timeless - and happening at this moment all over the repressed part of the world (and that's most of it) if not in Britain.Plot twists till the very end. Highly recommended.

Christian Petzold the German director has come to inhabit the space left by Haneke, Von Donnersmarck, Antonioni in film, and Kafka, Koestler ,Camus and Faulkner in literature, in the making of his series of films, Yella, Phoenix, Barbara and now Transit. Transit is based on the novel by Anna Seghers about her experiences of escaping from a Nazi-occupied Europe via Marseilles. Petzold talks about emigration, together with immigration, the ghosts of the past inhabiting the fugitive lives of refugees in the present; the menace of fascism occupying both past and present. As Faulkner said, “the past is not dead, it’s not even past.” Is man in exile, where is our homeland? The nodal point of the present ‘present’ in the film is Marseilles, that multicultural city, on the northern Mediterranean shores, looking out to Africa. Today too man is in exile from normality due to a modern pandemic; vast numbers of immigrants are crossing Europe, fleeing from wars, famine in a search for human rights and a better life. Like all the best directors, he has been blessed by using good actors like Nina Hoss, with her elusive beauty, and in Transit, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer. Rogoski as Georg brings charismatic intensity, warmth; Paula Beer is the mystery beauty who’s writer –husband has committed suicide (unbeknownst to her). Petzold takes the past and sees what happens when he transposes it into the present( the past infects us still). Everything in Marseilles is in transition but is scorched by a bright pitiless sun without shadow. Petzold has said he doesn’t like the museum of costume drama, so the Germans are invisible. Here, now we get a kind of momentary freedom as people with stories to tell sort out their visas, driven by fear and the urgency of boarding the next available boat. We inhabit a liminal space, where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown, a waiting room of hell. In limbo everything unfolds for refugees, where they develop and tell their own story. We exist in a state of consciousness where past and present are interchangeable.Georg assumes the identity of the dead writer he had to hand 2 letters to, one from Weidel’s wife, one from the Mexican Consul. In Paris, ‘aliens’ duck and dive to avoid ‘spring cleaning.’ He assists an injured friend Heinz to get to Marseilles to his wife and child, but he has to give them bad news. There, enigmatic Marie keeps bumping into him thinking he is her husband. He falls in love with her, but dares not tell her that husband Weidel is dead. Georg appropriates Weidel’s identity, quoting one of Kafka’s stories as if he wrote it himself* .He gains 2 visas, ships passage and a money order. The film should be seen as a fiction written by the writer-director to be read: by reading, it turns human experience into a kind of object that you can look at and turn over. Possibility jostles with futility and abandon, profit with loss, love with despair. The voice-over narrator enters the story in Marseilles. Georg finds when he goes for a room he can only stay in the hotel if he can prove he is not going to stay. He is all but invisible to the local populace. He strikes up a relationship with dead Heinz’s son and mute wife, Melissa and Driss, feeling an obligation to their plight. He creates a substitute family, fixing their radio, playing football with Driss, taking him to the fair. They are illegals from Maghreb. Then finds a doctor to help Driss recover from his asthma . The doctor lives with Marie, who is still waiting on her ex to supply a visa. They all have a narrow window before the Nazis ‘cleansing’. Georg gets caught up with Marie’s and the doctor’s fates. Everybody is on a road to nowhere (music at end) : we inhabit a land of death, shades and stasis. Meticulously told like a short story. Loved the film, but wonder if the voice-over narration depletes its dynamic, showing not telling. Also, can we compare immigrants to Europe (today) with emigrants from Europe? Great themes.* "You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don't you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn't bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: 'What do you think you're waiting for? You've been in Hell for a long time already.'

The idea of telling a story written about WW2 (based on a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers) in an undefined present tense is probably a good one, as it allows us to think of parallels in the modern world. The themes are being a refugee, trying to get somewhere safe, people unable to cope with the pressure, and the complexities of being caught in bureaucracies that may or may not allow you to leave. Georg, the main character, is stuck in Marseille, having assumed the identity of a dead writer whose papers he has been entrusted with. He later meets this man's estranged wife, by an unlikely coincidence, and befriends a young North African boy whose mother is deaf and dumb. Somehow the effect of the film is not really to take you into anything, not even the baking Marseille sun. There is so little sense of the specificity of this place. This is compounded by all the rooms having the same ochre/buff-coloured walls, no matter what building they are in! It seems very much to be about joining up the dots, of which there are many, but every scene just feels light, like something acted. It isn't helped by a voiceover that is far too present, and rather artificial. The device reduces what we see to a sort of illustration of what we are told, confirming its roots in a novel, but failing to come to life on the screen. It's partly that too much happens, but more than that, it fails to engage with the substance of the story, or to convey the feeling of real life.