Transit Film Review
Transit is a film of many layers, it’s about immigration, fascism, the transience of time and the nightmare of bureaucracy. It is Petzold’s final film in his unofficial ‘love in the time of oppression’ trilogy (Barbara and Phoenix being the other two). Transit stars Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer as spectral immigrants trying to flee France before it is overtaken by Fascism.
Petzold fascinatingly uses Anna Seghers novel of the same name but transposes it to the modern-day rather than the ’40s, creating an anachronistic film that belongs simultaneously in the past and the present, like ghosts if you will. The novel is very symbolic for the director as he was introduced to it many years ago by his friend, mentor and collaborator Harun Farocki and while I haven’t read the novel just yet (I will for sure after seeing the movie twice!) I can tell that his interpretation of the novel is respectful.
“Wer vergisst schneller? Der Verlassene oder die, die ihn verlassen hat?“
"Who forgets faster? The abandoned or the one who left him?”
Many of Petzold’s films deal with transit, he has his characters often on physical journeys that lead them to moments of self-discovery, but perhaps Transit is his most literal and obvious mediation on the idea. Characters are stuck between freedom and certain destruction and as such, they drift around the port city of Marseille like spectres and perhaps non more so than Paula Beer’s Marie Weidel.
She is a woman searching for her writer husband that she abandoned, but out of guilt (and to get a ticket out of there!), she starts looking for him. She rushes around the city always wearing the same coat and very similar clothes almost as if she herself is haunting the place, that she is already beyond the realm of the living. Rogowski’s Georg encounters her several times, often because she has mistaken him as her husband, which is ironic because he has stolen her husband’s identity after the writer committed suicide. What occurs is a cycle of guilt for both characters and they slowly grow closer over the three weeks they are stuck in limbo at Marseille, but there is always a barrier between them.
I watched the film twice in close succession and I definitely found I preferred it on the re-watch, everything including subtext and symbolism sunk in just that little bit more on the second time around. I wonder if it will get even better with the third watch…
