Transit

Transit is based on a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers, in turn based on her experiences as a German Jewish Communist political refugee in Marseilles trying to get out of Vichy France to Mexico. The protagonist is a German illegally in France, who travels from Paris to Marseilles, through chance assumes the identity of a dead German leftist writer who has an exit visa to Mexico, and finds himself involved with both the writer's estranged wife and the wife and son of a fellow German illegal.

What made the movie work for me is that it is not a routine World War II vintage costume drama. Director-Writer Christian Petzold has chosen to set the entire story in present day France. There are no Nazis, no swastikas, and no political explanations. There are only the omnipresent French police checking papers in the street, raiding hotels and apartments, and rounding up illegal aliens for deportation to an unnamed destination, assisted by good French citizens either venal or patriotic, and the desperate struggle of the refugees to procure legitimate identity and travel documents in the face of bureaucratic indifference or hostility. It all feels like it could be happening six months from now, there or, for that matter, here. The contemporary setting greatly increases the tension by taking away historical cues -- you have no idea how it is going to come out or whether the hero will make his getaway to Mexico.

Very well acted this movie reproduces perfectly the depressing mood of the time when the book was written(1944). Great idea to place it in the modern France.

Highly recommended. Imaginative setting, letters of transit, Occupied France, unrequited love, maybe a bit slow, making it seem a bit long at times, and an enigmatic ending, of course. The German actor a doppelgänger of Joaquin Phoenix. A sometimes intense, always intelligent, certainly worthwhile 'art' film set in Paris, Marseilles and your imagination. We all have waited in a bar, a glass of wine in front of us, waiting for a woman we love.

German Director Christian Petzold's latest, TRANSIT, follows in the line of his excellent movies PHOENIX and BARBARA as another exploration of individual identity during periods of high political tensions. Based on a WWII novel, Petzold made the conscious decision to not be another period piece by setting in the present. Or, did he? The world we find in TRANSIT is like a parallel alternate reality. All shot in present day France. No visual effects. But, there is something off. Most of the clothes and props the main characters wear and use seem to come from the 1940s. Europe has been plunged into some unspecified war. Refugees are being expelled. Others desperate to emigrate legally to the Americas. Transit visas are like gold. Georg (Franz Rogowski) is a German stuck in Marseilles. By chance he acquires a Transit visa from another man, but, this requires him to take on the other man's identity. A mysterious woman, Marie (Paula Beer, recently seen in the exceptional NEVER LOOK AWAY) seems to keep appearing before him. Always elusive. Eventually, they meet, only to make things more complicated. Petzold is after something very tricky here. Without ever fully explaining the world he is building, we are plunged into it often leaving the viewer as baffled as the characters. The parallels to the refugee crisis in present day Europe are obvious (Georg interacts with an African woman and her child, and later, with a Muslim family), but never hammered home. Stylistically, Petzold has created an odd blend between a Noirish CASABLANCA and a totalitarian Orwellian 1984 present, all by way of Antonioni's THE PASSENGER. The past and present fold in and out, like something out of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. TRANSIT is a heady mix that won't be for all tastes, and Petzold doesn't fully command this world as well as he has in his past features. Still, it's a movie that's hard to shake. The acting is quite strong including the two leads, and a particularly strong supporting bit by Barbara Auer. TRANSIT may not be to the level of Petzold's previous few pictures, but, it's a worthy entry that lingers in the mind.

What I liked: the intertwined and unexpected developments of this love triangle (or square?) of WW2 refugees in Marseille... ingeniously "teleported" in the current days. What I didn't like: the somehow uncertain adaptation to a story of seemingly current events...