Review by Zach Dennis
In the cinema of the Weimar period in Germany, the uncanny had a tendency to disrupt reality. What was real and was was surreal was absorbed into one another, and that state of flux created the perception of the lack of distinction between the real and the unreal acts perpetrated by the world around it. That would seem to be a natural state for Transit, a film neither finding a home in the past nor the present; similarly, it is neither a thriller nor a melodrama, neither a statement nor a warning.
The central conceit of the movie feeds the uncanny. “Taking place” in the occupation of France by the Nazis, the setting couldn’t be more different. Modern police cars and armed soldiers line the streets — an insurgence is here, but not the one we are familiar with.
How are we in Nazi-occupied France when none of the signifiers are there?
Writer/director Christian Petzold asks us instead to consider the weight of those symbols rather than the fall into comfort of their familiarity as harbingers of evil. Why does the swastika become more recognizable than the acts committed by those who wore it? This France we are dropped into feels nothing like the occupied space we know from history because it occupies an even greater question — what if we never escaped that time?
Everyone is trying to run away from the terror, including Georg (Franz Rogowski), who is fortunate enough to come across a visa and transit pass after attempting to deliver a letter to an author who, as Georg soon learns, was found dead in his hotel room the day before. Armed with his newfound freedom, Georg ends up in the port city of Marseilles; again evoking our nostalgia and familiarity with wartime loneliness in a port city a la Casablanca.
But this isn’t the luxurious romance of the Bogart/Bergman film. Instead, Petzold mars us in the purgatorial nature of escaping encroaching obliteration — mentioned here as a “cleansing.” Here, we are placed in more of the state of engulfing fascism than Michael Curtiz gave us in 1942 because while the facade may seem familiar to our modern eyes, what’s eroding the characters inside is as true to the past as it is the present.
Transit lacks the more defined villains of Casablanca or any of the more recent WWII-infused offerings. It isn’t Dunkirk with its unnamed, omnipresent evil surrounding the troops or the re-imagined cartoonishness of The Man in the High Castle or Overlord. Instead, it places the evil in our own psyches — the sense that anyone could give you up if it meant finding their own escape.
In this sense, Transit doesn’t feel so far removed from the psychological wrestling taking place in the German cinema during the designated time period of the narrative. In those films, the characters grappled with the interiority of their nationalistic strife, and found some resolution through a twisted, surreal world. The encroaching consumption of fascism by the German state was natural, but unquantifiable by the art of that period. All they could muster was a serial-killing somnambulist or a hulking automaton to make sense of what was happening around them. In much the same way, Transit drops us in something so familiar and real that we soon forget we are experiencing a period piece.
Because in a way we aren’t.
There isn’t much difference between the corralling of people in the film and those being abducted by ICE in the United States — the padded armor and semi-automatic weapons brandished by the soldiers feels just as familiar in Arizona or Texas today as France or Germany in 1942. The difference is our familiarity with the images and what we disseminate as historically evil and part of the present day condition.
Gone are the swastika, storm-trooper helmets or gray and red uniforms that have become synonymous with the National Socialist movement of Nazi Germany, and instead, we see the word “POLICE” seared on black, padded armor as the officers beat stragglers found among a recently docked train. This feels foreign and unaccountable in the context of its modern setting, but makes the point that focusing on the semiotics of the Nazis has tarnished our concept of evil, leading to more modern cases that don’t feel like they carry the same gravitas as the atrocities of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
There’s also the desolation of identity. All of the people in limbo — waiting for that visa to carry through — are shaped by their environment and their predicament. One man speaks of being a modern music conductor, who is being asked to conduct outside of the country even though he doesn’t believe the people of Caracas have the modern music he specializes in. The comment is a bit elitist but can be pushed offhand when realizing that despite his specialties in the arts, his real role is that of an emigrant.
He now is a member of the nation of this particular line at the embassy like the others and is no more unique than Georg or the others waiting for answers.
As Georg sinks more into his own mistaken identity — coming in contact with the dead author’s wife, Marie (Paula Beer), and falling in love with her — and the movie sinks more into being a melodrama rather than a thriller, the personal doesn’t tarnish the fear of their reality or the grip of the evil coming towards them. Instead, it adds that depth of emotion that becomes unquantifiable when looking back at the legacy and toll of this situation on those who lived it.
It’s one thing to take down the symbols and structures that personified oppression, but as the conceit of Transit teaches us, there is no way to expound the toll of their acts from the people who lived them.