There’s an unlikely addictiveness to the films of German writer-director Christian Petzold. Though they sometimes risk becoming excessively neat academic exercises, featuring stoic actors moving mechanically through archetypal noir plots that offer their characters little breathing room, there’s a fleet-footed, chiselled elegance to them that wins out. (His name sounds like his movies, crisp and pretzeled.) All the pleasures of a ‘good story well told’ are there, but – as with his contemporaries – always as a means to an intellectually stimulating end.
As flawlessly and pristinely crafted as his prior films, the borderline sci-fi conceit of 2018’s Transit – the third in a thematic trilogy the director has dubbed “Love in a Time of Oppressive Systems”, following 2012’s Barbara and 2014’s Phoenix – nonetheless marked the first big conceptual swing he’d taken, even as his previous films flirted with the supernatural (most overtly in 2007’s Yella) and in the case of the 1980 East Germany-set Barbara, pointedly evaded period signifiers for a good chunk of the runtime. By contrast, Transit is a period drama that constantly unmoors itself from its nominal period, putting us in the same state of rootlessness as its characters.
Based on the semi-autobiographical 1944 novel of the same name by Jewish German author Anna Seghers, set in Marseille during the time of Nazi-occupied France, the film also deals with the demoralising, Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare of obtaining the legal documentation required for political refugees to depart from, travel to and arrive in another country. It’s a process that requires a great deal of stamina, and allows plenty of downtime for hopes to fade and plans to change. As the novel’s unnamed narrator tells it, “I was reckoning in consulate time, a kind of planetary time in which you equate earthly days with millions of years because worlds can burn in the time it takes a transit visa to expire.”
Petzold has streamlined the convolutions of Seghers’ narrative to a degree, but he complicates things by introducing rifts that open up a temporal liminal space; the backdrop is unmistakably contemporary, with post-WWII-into-present-day vehicles, architecture, graffiti and more, yet the principle characters in the foreground dress and act the era, largely oblivious to and unaffected by the signs of a later modernity around them (for instance, there’s a large touchscreen display in a cafe’s entrance at one point, but no one is seen using an electronic device).
The anachronisms throughout are sparse enough to be jarring: a consul alludes to a CIA-aided assassination of an unspecified unionist in Spain, a ’50s-ish portable transistor radio is repaired in painstaking detail, the contemporary architect Rudy Ricciotti and his 2013 Marseille footbridge are mentioned, and there’s an end-credits music cue from 1985 that’s best not spoiled. Befitting a film about the rise of fascism that refuses to close itself off to a single epoch, the eerie feeling Petzold achieves comes from how much we’re able to acquiesce as viewers to this alternate reality.
Identity proves just as slippery as time. Jewish German exile Georg (Joaquin Phoenix lookalike, Franz Rogowski, recently seen in the German comedy-drama In the Aisles and Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life) arrives in a deceptively sunny Marseille after escaping arrest in Paris, with the aim of returning the personal effects and documents of dissident writer Weidel – found dead from an apparent suicide in his Paris hotel – to the Mexican consulate. At the consulate, a slip-up on the consul’s part leads Georg to assume the identity of Weidel, who possessed documents granting safe passage to Mexico for him and his wife Marie. Georg then falls for a woman he later learns is in fact Marie (Paula Beer), and whose search for her husband is reinvigorated by the false promise from the consulate that he is alive and in town – the unintended result of Georg’s idle meddling.
Franz Rogowski in ‘Transit’. Source: SBS
As with many noirs, Georg and Marie’s tentative romance comes with a looming expiration date, driving home a cynical vision of love as product of projection, delusion and outright deceit, inevitably recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (itself the reference for several Petzold films, particularly Phoenix) right down to its Bernard Hermann-echoing score and the final ironic reversal.
A more inspired touchstone, though, comes in the form of George A. Romero’s 1978 satirical horror classic Dawn of the Dead, referenced via voiceover by the (mostly) unseen narrator. The sight of shoppers in Marseille during a time of crisis is likened to Romero’s zombies (“Not even the dead can come up with a better idea,” the narrator bemoans), who return to a mall based on what a character in Dawn memorably described as “some kind of instinct, memory of what they used to do… this was an important place in their lives”.
Like the living dead returning to a consumerist haven out of habit, is Marie’s attraction to Georg right, or do we become involved and cheer for them out of some zombie-like impulse based on the formulae of other movies and movie romances? (Why Georg and Marie and not Georg and Melissa, the North African widow of the former’s late travel companion Heinz, with whom Georg shares an instant, palpable connection?)
Beyond the conceptual ingenuity of the film, Transit is a casually sublime mood piece, remarkable for a film that favours plot over mood, or more accurately uses its sometimes dizzying exposition as mood. When the film takes a rare pause to soak up the atmosphere, the effect is stunning, as in the moment during the early Paris-to-Marseille train journey, in which the empty adjacent tracks outside race by like a film strip in the glow of the moonlight above, visually superimposed over a sleeping Georg and the dying Heinz. Just as these straight lines in motion create an illusion of stasis from velocity, Transit paints a haunting picture of being perpetually on the move on a road to nowhere.
Watch ‘Transit’
Sunday 6 February, 3:10am on SBS World Movies / Now streaming at SBS On Demand
M
Germany, France, 2018
Genre: Drama
Language: German, French
Director: Christian Petzold
Starring: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman
