Transit (2019)

Film: Transit (2019)
Stars: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese
Director: Christian Petzold
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Occasionally you are confronted with the fact that an up-and-coming filmmaker, one whose name you've seen written and raved about, is someone whose filmography you've never actually encountered.  This was the case after I saw Transit, and realized Christian Petzold was the man behind the picture, and had also been behind Barbara & Phoenix, both of whom I remember thinking "I need to see that movie" after the trailers played in my local Landmark.  Thankfully, I'm no longer estranged from Petzold's filmography (and have added both of his previous films to my Netflix queue), as Transit proves him to be a rare talent, someone who knows how to mine drama in the strangest of places, and to mess with historical form to give a truly compelling story.

(Spoilers Ahead-And I Mean It!) I usually start by explaining the plot of each movie, so you have some grounding in the story we're discussing, but it's difficult to sum up Transit without getting into the theoretical aspects of the picture's plot.  Suffice it to say, Georg (Rogowski) has been traveling from Paris to Marseille in hope of escaping an oppressive regime, strongly indicated to be the Nazis though that's not entirely clear and we'll get to why in a second.  He's accompanied by a writer named Heinz (Ronald Kukulies), who is dying, and in fact passes away on the covert ride to Marseille.  Georg met him because he was giving Heinz a letter from the writer's wife Marie (Beer).  Georg goes to Marseille, and is mistaken for Heinz.  He soon realizes if he pretends to be Heinz for three weeks, he'll be able to flee from Marseille, which is supposedly about to be taken over by the authoritarian regime (at least that's that's a ticking clock in the background of the picture), and go to Mexico, where he'd be safe from this oppression.  While he's waiting, he bides his time becoming a surrogate father to a boy called Driss (Lilien Batman), and eventually meets Marie, who is having an affair with a doctor named Richard (Giese) but mostly just waiting for her husband to return.  The film unfolds with Georg having his own affair with Marie, convincing her to take the ticket that was intended for her all along.

The movie's power comes from a very tight script, one that easily could have fallen apart considering the complicated angles that Petzold's playing with Georg and what's clearly going on in the background.  I described the movie right after seeing it as a weird combination of Casablanca, Vertigo, and Celine & Julie Go Boating, which feels about right (and if that doesn't make you want to see the movie, we have different tastes in cinema).  The Casablanca and Vertigo angles are most obvious-we see Georg transform into a different person, here having Rogowski somehow become both the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak characters in Hitch's masterpiece, while the struggle to move from Marseille with only "two letters from transit" is obviously an homage to Casablanca; there's even a bartender narrator and one of the main characters is named Richard.  But Celine & Julie play a part here, as we're caught in some sort of strange, repetitive hellscape, with beautiful Marseille looking decisively modern, despite the fact that we assume at the beginning of the picture that there's some sort of allegory for World War II, and that we are witnessing World War II's driving out of the Jews.

This is where Petzold's genius comes in-not to name-check another classic movie, but like Cabaret, you will see the fascist ending coming a mile away upon repeat viewings, but you're so caught up in the sweeping "who will survive?" tug-of-war between Georg, Marie, and Richard, that you would be forgiven the ending, when a group of armed men come to presumably take Georg away, & we learn that Marie & Richard have likely died after their transit to America has been attacked (though Beer appears, like she does so many times in the picture, running just out-of-reach of Georg proving the story may continue to repeat).

The film is probably meant to literally be about the Holocaust, but is existentialist enough that you can't quite tell.  Petzold fills the movie with unmistakable modern touches (the cars, weapons, dress, and room decor would be preposterous in the 1940's), which gives the movie a nasty chill.  It's just as easy to assume this is about the current rise of neo-nazism in Europe & the United States, or the way that that movement has shaped our thoughts on the refugee crisis & immigration.  The fact that you can't tell the difference between the Holocaust and how the people of Syria are being treated and moved around by a seeming lottery of luck is so well-lensed you won't think about it until your car ride home.  But it works-this is a damn good movie, and one that plays better the more you think about it, which is rare for a story so dependent on twists and plot.  The acting is uniformly good, though Rogowski wins best-in-show.  Most known to arthouse audiences for his work in Michael Haneke's Happy End, he plays Georg as a vessel for the audience, but also his own Rubik's Cube of a human being, a man caught in an impossible situation, likely already doomed but still spared a bit of hope at odd junctures.  We should know that this is the end for him the moment he steps onto the screen, but to quote the film that inspired this fabulous picture, he's just "waiting...and waiting...and waiting..."