A mystery that’s persistently dedicated to leaving its riddles unsolved, Christian Petzold’s Transit opens in ambiguity. Employing a Francophone setting that might just as easily be North Africa as Paris, it splashes chaos over its beautiful old-world exteriors, refusing to offer firm details on what exactly is going on. Riot-gear-clad storm troopers pound the pavement and journalists are thrown up against cement walls, bound for detention camps, as rumors about German advances hang heavy in the air. The political situation here remains unexplained even as its outlines become clearer, confirming a mounting sense of the past being revisited upon the present. This places the film’s location less in any recognizable present or future than a tumultuous metaphoric slipstream, where the same tragedies keep happening again and again.
In short, it’s an alternate-reality fable that doesn’t feel far removed from our present state of affairs. This effect has been achieved by adapting Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, a chronicle of various endangered individuals attempting a last-minute escape from an expanding Nazi empire. Updating the setting while snipping off most overt au courant signifiers, it casts up an ominously familiar netherworld stuck between history and modernity. It’s a move which at first seems like a vague stab at political frisson, an overwrought attempt to contrast contemporary global unrest with the world’s last period of monumental rupture. Instead, Petzold’s assured, subtle direction gradually asserts Transit as something else, a scintillating story of shuffled identities which grafts its central metaphor onto the narrative itself.
Georg (Franz Rogowski) is a French journalist of German extraction, stuck in Paris as the city melts down around him. Posing as German police, he gets access to the hotel room of a famous writer, in hopes of passing along some letters a friend has failed to deliver. He finds, however, only the bloody residue of a hurried suicide, and ends up with two other letters, the sudden burden of all this correspondence establishing an enduring fixation on papers and documents as paltry summations of humanity. Fleeing a crackdown which leaves him a fugitive, Georg’s paper trail becomes the paramount focus as he juggles identities in an effort to clear passage to Mexico, while also failing to muster the selfishness required to save only himself.
Where so many wartime accounts hinge on the resultant loss of humanity that accompanies a mass descent into brutality, Transit does the opposite, depicting compassion as a burning desire that can’t be so easily extinguished. Refusing to surrender to the dehumanizing program of his new overlords by becoming something purely ascribed on paper, Georg tends to the embers of empathy, even as this ministrance threatens his own survival. This pulsing altruistic center counters the cut-and-dry gamesmanship of the sinuous story, which maintains a coyness about details in order to push forth a series of narrative twists. In this sense, the film’s layering of a World War II potboiler over an otherwise modern housing mirrors the mechanics of its plot, in which several characters play out elaborate fictions by assuming the identities of others, while also pointing to how such posturing is never reducible to exact analogy.
Inherent to this proposition, however, is the belief that the soul of Europe is again at stake; the internal cancer that first metastasized 80 years ago has returned, as people fleeing other conflicts threaten existing notions of national and continental identity. Petzold uses this situation less as a cause for didacticism than an excuse to expand the elusive headspace of his previous films, which have of late handled trauma from a cerebrally pulpy, psychosocial vantage. The concept of filming a diverse series of Vertigo reimaginings, all centered around massive cultural upheavals but focused on minute personal relations, has developed steadily from Barbara’s tale of an illicit cross-border romance in an East German prison. Phoenix, which examined the anguish of a concentration camp survivor, made the tacit civic tensions lurking beneath most psychological thrillers explicit, foregrounding them in a story similarly fixated on shifting identities and stubbornly enduring devotion.
This practice of turning formerly seedy genre material inside out has been on the rise lately, and to increasingly diminished returns, with horror and action flicks striving for the kind of mass-market respectability formerly granted only to prestige product. Against the odds, Transit again finds Petzold managing to achieve this reach without making it feel cheap or excessive, threading playful narrative flourishes through a somber, serious reckoning with political reality, accounting for multiple viewpoints while maintaining a resolutely German perspective. Offering an intelligent revision of multiple sources of old material, he once more succeeds in contextualizing the present in surprising fashion, enfolding the struggles of our current moment within a reflective format echoing the parallels of an all too recent past.
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