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Transit
****
Dir: Christian Petzold
Starring: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer
(Germany/France, 12A, 1hr 41mins)
Marseille has always been a much more interesting city to set a film in than Paris. The capital has never done much to impress me and as a cinematic setting it’s mostly tired and overused. Marseille however, has a lot more going for it, with the huge industrial ports set against the densely-packed old streets, looming above as the city rises into the hills – and in Transit it’s used superbly. The film, a strange, unidentifiable beast at times, has been most commonly described as Casablanca via Kafka, and that’s easily the best way of putting it.
Our protagonist Georg (Franz Rogowski) starts off in Paris, with a seemingly fascist Germany looming across to take over the city – the film seems to be set in some halfway-house between the modern day and WWII. Moving to escape, Georg hides in a train leaving for the south, having come into possession of visas for an author who has since committed suicide. Once in Marseille, he sets about assuming the author’s identity in an attempt to escape the looming occupation. It’s not worth divulging much more of the plot than that, as much of the film’s glorious ambiguity is delineated in its mystery-drenched plot. Suffice to say however, with the protagonists increasingly trapped in Marseille, piling into various embassies clamouring for visas, the city’s topography begins to feel very claustrophobic. Frequently Petzold finds angles where we can see the sea behind the street as the hill rolls away, as if to reinforce the idea that you’re barricaded in with the waters at your backside.
Much like Petzold’s previous film Phoenix, the central theme of this film is about the intricate specificities of who we love and why. Do we fall in love with the idea of a person rather than the physical human being? How much do we choose who we share intimacy with? How much does circumstance and environment play into our feelings? These kinds of complex, knotty questions, impossible to answer satisfactorily, are at the heart of Petzold’s work. By introducing subtle genre elements into his films (Transit often plays like the most low-key thriller you’ve ever seen), he allows himself more freedom to toy with the central questions he’s keen to ask.
Transit’s central drama is focused around the refugee nature of its protagonists, and their constantly shifting identities as a result – the constant anxiety of being stateless, non-existent in the eyes of bureaucracy looms over our characters like the sword of Damocles. The film’s ever-shifting, ambiguous nature is a truthful reflection of that. The implications and meanings of its various relationships linger long in the memory.
words Fedor Tot
Out now in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema