Movie review: 'Transit' an effective, if confusing, Holocaust movie set in more modern times
“Transit” — ★ ★ ★
The movie “Transit” opens at a cafe in Paris as a police siren wails outside. The conversation — between two men at a bar making arrangements for transportation — is furtive: “Paris is being sealed off,” one whispers, before handing over letters for his companion, Georg, to deliver to a third man. Soon after, Georg encounters the man from the bar again on the street, only he has been detained, along with several others, by police in riot gear. When one of the cops asks Georg for his “papers,” Georg socks him in the jaw and makes a run for it.
The year is — well, what year is it, exactly? Although the police vehicles are modern, along with everything else in the film, the setting, based on circumstantial evidence, seems to be Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Georg (played by Joaquin Phoenix look-alike Franz Rogowski), a German Jew, is on the run, it would appear. But is this the past or the present? At first glance, “Transit” plays like some surrealistic vision of a dystopian near-future, in which the Holocaust has repeated itself, to the letter, but minus swastikas.
In fact, the film, by German writer-director Christian Petzold, is based on a 1944 book by German writer Anna Seghers, one whose story has been transplanted, wholesale, from the 1940s to today. Some details are out of place — or missing — yet several elements of the present-day setting add extra resonance to the gimmick. Strangely, there are no cellphones, and people use typewriters. But there is video surveillance. And a story line centering on the plight of an illegal North African immigrant and her son (Maryam Zaree and Lilien Batman), who are befriended by Georg after he flees to Marseille, gives the goings-on a disturbingly contemporary echo.
The story is, at heart, a romance, albeit a far-fetched one: When Georg attempts to deliver the letters, he finds that their recipient, a writer, has killed himself. Georg avails himself of the dead man's passport and identity, along with the letters, one of which grants him passage to Mexico. He sneaks into Marseille to wait — along with hundreds of other refugees — for his ship to sail.
While there, he meets, by chance, and falls in love with the dead writer's widow, Marie (Paula Beer), who has also been granted safe passage out of France, on her husband's papers. The fact that she doesn't know that her husband is dead — or that Georg is now masquerading as him — complicates things in ways that are far more powerful and evocative than they have any right to be. If this is a melodrama — and it is — it's a particularly eccentric, dry-eyed and astringent one.
In Marseille, the refugees continually wind up in a restaurant whose bartender turns out to be the narrator of the film, and whose narration turns out to be taken, word for word, from Seghers's novel, a manuscript of which Georg has carried around with him since he found it in the dead writer's apartment.
All this can make “Transit” a bit confusing, in addition to lending it the patina of metafiction. There's a mood of weird detachment that ultimately makes what happens to Georg and Marie, paradoxically, not less real, but more so. It's a story whose ending has the impact of something that, like a repetition of the Holocaust, feels simultaneously unexpected and, devastatingly, preordained.
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Starring: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Maryam Zaree, Lilien Batman
Directed by: Christian Petzold
Other: A Music Box Films release. In limited release. Unrated. Contains strong language, mature thematic elements and brief bloody images. In German and French with subtitles. 101 minutes