Transit

Anna Seghers’s titular 1944 novel about Jewish refugees trapped in Marseilles while trying to flee the Nazi advance into France forms the basis for Christian Petzold’s film, but Transit is no period piece. While the plot is not altered, the story is presented in modern dress, minus the trappings that would distance the events from our own era. And this makes the narrative as relevant as it was 75 years ago, serving up a timeless, existential fable of displacement. The protagonist is Georg (Franz Rogowski), a Jewish radio technician who has escaped from Germany and adopts the identity of a writer who committed suicide, intending to take advantage of the dead man’s guarantee of safe passage to Mexico. But his plan grows complicated after he meets the writer’s estranged wife, Marie (Paula Beer), who is seeking her husband, and he falls in love with her. Georg also interacts with others, including a soccer-loving boy desperate for a surrogate father and his deaf-mute mother; a pathetic orchestral conductor hoping to reach South America; a steely Jewish architect left behind by her colleagues; a kindly doctor who also loves Marie and plans on taking her to safety; and the consulate officials who need to approve Georg’s papers. Petzold gives Georg’s sojourn in Marseilles an off-kilter, vaguely hallucinatory quality that conveys the state of impermanence in which he finds himself (and by extension relating to every refugee, or any human being stuck in a world of sudden, uncontrollable change). The peculiar style of Transit may put off some viewers, but for others it will make the Casablanca-like narrative even more compelling. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)