TRANSIT Review
In an occupied France, a “cleansing” is underway. But this isn’t 1940’s France under Nazi control. In director Christian Petzold’s terse thriller/drama, TRANSIT, a modern day France is under attack from a creeping and inevitable force of racial persecution and extermination. Looking for a way out, the scrappy Georg (Franz Rogowski), a pursued German, creeps through the beautiful streets of Paris looking for a way out before he becomes another victim to the country’s occupying forces. With a bit of luck mixed with terrible happenstance, Georg finds his getaway ticket in the shoes of a dead man, a dead “communist” writer to be exact, who was planning on fleeing the country into Mexico with his wife Marie (Paula Beer).
But Marie doesn’t enter the story until what feels like the middle of the action, instead allowing Petzold to concoct a tense and terrifying vision (if not replay) of an occupation in Europe and the millions of unlucky people caught in the middle of it. In Georg’s world, the sounds of police sirens are to be feared, an unwelcome prelude to the hundreds of raids that will surely take him and any other targeted individuals (Petzold never makes clear just who exactly is being “cleansed” from Europe, but Germans are on the list) to a mysterious and deadly end. Despite the film’s rather travelogue-esque scenery, from settings to the aged cobblestones of Paris to the blue waters and coastal air of Marseille, brilliantly captured in waves of intoxicating beauty by cinematographer Hans Fromm, the overall sense of dread concocted by Petzold brilliantly offsets the scenic images. In the first half of TRANSIT, Petzold evocatively frames a dystopian yet all too real world around Georg who looks over every corner and social interaction with a mix of mistrust and fear. We never learn much about Georg, a true “alien” in every sense of the word: unknown, unwanted, and completely alone.
Despite this lack of background, it’s a testament to Petzold’s writing (adapted from a novel by Anna Seghers) that the audience stays in the throes of Georg’s plight as we watch a man pushed to brink of humanity scraping by for a means of survival in any way he can. Mr. Rogowski (a near dead-ringer for Joaquin Phoenix), for his part, also brings those wrenching traces of a still clinging humanity to Georg, allowing his sad, shadowed eyes to display a former man turned to that of a constantly on the run refugee despite his desperate reaches for any sort of personal relationship whether that involves love (with Marie) or care (as it goes when he meets a refugee boy and his deaf mother). No matter where Georg turns, those familiar and deadly forces further encroach on him and other refugees leaving little time for feelings other than self-preservation.
True, whether from his hidden dwellings in Paris to his later reconnaissance with a dead man’s wife and a shabby doctor in Marseille, the world of Georg and TRANSIT is a truly intoxicating place of mystery and deceit, especially in the later half of the film as Petzold moves his story into themes of mistaken (and stolen) identity and self-perseverance in the face of encroaching horrors. While Petzold shows a deft hand at crafting growing tension and dread in this second half as Georg slowly ingratiates himself into Marie’s orbit, their relationship on the whole feels a little light, mainly as the film has its spacey mysteriousness and oblique characterization enter into the character’s interactions nulling any further connection with the characters and their ill-advised romance. Nevertheless, Petzold maintains a solid hold over his story especially as he draws provocative imagery and scenarios that not only draw from the ills of the Nazi regime but even the present day’s handling of the refugee experience in Europe.
By the time TRANSIT reaches its quietly haunting ending, audiences are left pondering the plight of the “refugee” or “alien” that they may read about in a headline or two in their local newspaper. For Georg, his journey gets the benefit of a crisp and assured cinematic telling; for the millions of other real-life refugees, both past and present, their trials only get the slightest of chances of being known.
3.5/5
