Transit

 Transit (2018 Christian Petzold) is a maddening film.  Although it is well-made and timely, the way that the characters behave makes you want to slap them silly.   Furthermore, the picture's narrative is mostly very predictable -- you can see most plot twists coming well before they are revealed.  The movie has a satisfyingly spooky ending -- this is genuinely surprising, but in a way that is a bit unfair.  The film's sudden swerve into the supernatural isn't motivated by the narration -- the ghost that appears arbitrarily at the end of picture seems to violate the rather scrupulous, if abstract, realism that characterizes the rest of the movie.  A film is effective to the extent that it grips a viewer's imagination.  Petzold's Transit certainly is compelling, but not in a pleasant way.  It's tense and frightening but works on the audience in a way that is really the opposite of entertainment.  The sense that the film is a carefully engineered exercise in audience frustration is particularly disheartening because, in many ways, the movie is a variation on one of the most entertaining of all Hollywood films, Casablanca.  Both films involve a similar situation -- refugees from German fascism holed-up in an ostensibly neutral third-country, scheming to escape their hide-out as the noose slowly tightens around them.  Both films imvolve reference to concentration camps and "cleansing" (that is, reinigung -- the extermination of Jews).  Oddly enough both movies have as a central focal point a tavern or saloon catering to increasingly impoverished and frightened exiles from Nazism -- Rick's Cafe run by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and a rather less impressive bar in Marseilles in Transit.  In fact, there's a voice-over narrative in Transit that is very puzzling for most of the film -- who is speaking and how does this narrator know the story that he is recounting?  As it turns out, the doomed hero of Transit, Georg, a Jewish TV and radio repairman, has told his tale to the bartender at the Marseilles tavern.  The narrator, accordingly, is the barkeep who now fills us in on the details of Georg's adventures. Of course, I was rooting for poor Georg to escape the dragnet closing on him.  But he's a passive hero, not particularly resourceful, and, in the end, he turns out to be almost as much of a phantom as the ghost that makes a cameo appearance in the film's last five minutes.  

Transit is based on a renowned novel by the German writer, Anna Seghers.  One of her books, The Seventh Crucifix written in 1939 was made into an anti-Nazi picture in Hollywood in the forties during the War and Transit is obviously rooted in World War II. (Seghers wrote the book in 1944 -- it is semi-autobiographical, documenting the author's own escape to Mexico through Marseilles four years earlier.)  Petzold elects to tell the story in the present.  In other words, although the action happens in the 1940's, the cars and streets and clothing are all contemporary.  However, it's an odd version of 2018, one in which no one has a cell-phone, in which communication is by snail-mail and not computer emails, a peculiarly bookish world in which an important writer still has sufficient prestige to manipulate the levers of power even in the nightmarish bureaucratic milieu of customs and border enforcement. Presumably, the film was intended as some kind of rebuke to Trump's border policy -- it's always a bit dubious when Germans lecture American audiences about human rights abuses in the context of World War Two.   (This impression, that the film addresses American immigration policy is probably paranoia -- most likely, the immigration references in the movie relate to African and Syrian refugees flooding into Europe at the time the movie was made.  However, "if the shoe fits....") The title of the film is obscure to me -- although, ultimately, I interpreted "transit" to refer to something like an exit visa.  Seghers' book seems to have something to do with Walter Benjamin's hopeless attempt to escape Nazi authorities and his suicide when he erroneously thought that he was about to be captured.  

The film's plot is complicated, but not in an interesting way.  There are too many characters, often, a result from adopting a complex novel into a 90 minute film.  The gist of things is that Georg is hiding in Paris as the Nazi's approach.  He is persuaded to carry a letter to a writer named Weigel.  The letter is from Weigel's wife, Marie.  Weigel has committed gory suicide in his hotel room.  The Resistance spirits Georg away in a railroad storage car headed for Marseilles.  There's a wounded refugee in the car also fleeing, but he's lost a leg, it seems, and is very sick -- sepsis is killing him.  Georg reaches Marseilles and escapes authorities who pursue him.  The injured man has died, something that the audience figures out long before Georg, since apparently the dead refugee has ripened enough to create a stench in the storage container.  Georg delivers a message to the dead man's wife, an Algerian, I think, who, for some reason, is deaf and dumb.  (Usually characters are deaf and dumb for a narrative reason but I couldn't quite figure out the plot motivation for this detail.)  Georg becomes close to the dead man's little boy, Driss.  He has now assumed the identity of the suicide victim, Weigel.  At the Mexican Embassy and, then, the American embassy, Georg pretending to be Weigel gets a "transit" and entry visa for himself to flee to Mexico.  It's not obvious why two consulates are involved.  Both of them treat Georg- Weigel in a rude and cruel way and seem to have contempt for his plight.  Georg keeps encountering an attractive young woman.  We quickly figure out that this is Marie, the wife of the suicide victim.  It takes the dimwitted Georg quite a while to ascertain this fact -- I suppose he's not aware, as we are, that he's in a movie and that the movie is a knock-off of Casablanca, hence, there will be all sorts of anguished romance in the picture.  When Driss gets sick, Georg finds another exile, a pediatrician who helps the little boy who has become ill.  (The pediatrician is living with Marie Weigel, who like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca seems to be a bit casual about her sexual liaisons.  Although it's posited that Marie is fatally in love with Weigel, she doesn't seem to have much problem having sex with the pediatrician and, then, with Georg.)  There are lots of recriminations about people betraying one another -- the basic plot premise is that some will escape, but others will have to remain in the occupied country and, ultimately, be captured by the Nazis to perish horribly in a concentration camp.  One question arises twice:  who forgets the other more quickly? -- the one who successfully flees abandoning the other or the one left behind?  Different answers to this question are suggested.  As a result of these recriminations, characters have the tendency to get to the harbor, but, then, either refuse to board the ships leaving for safety or, for other inexplicable reasons, be denied access to these means of escape.  I presume that this motif of deferred escape and frustrated waiting is integral to the experience of being a refugee.  Ultimately, Georg secures a exit visa (transit) and other papers to allow Marie to escape with him.  Marie is delirious with joy expecting that Weigel will meet her "at the railing" on the ship -- it's wholly unclear to me why she believes this.  (Does she think that Weigel has been hiding in some other part of the town, afraid to meet her?)  In any event, at the last moment, Georg gives his passport to the noble, if conflicted, pediatrician allowing him to escape with Marie.  (The pediatrician thinks that Georg is just a venal coyote and human smuggler since the hero demands all of his cash before giving him the requisite papers -- why? I never figured this out either).  The pediatrician and Marie get on the boat and sail out of the harbor.  Georg is picked up by a sad woman who has been tending to two dogs for a couple of Americans while waiting for her papers to clear.  She doesn't get her transit and visa and commits suicide after having a final meal with Georg.  (All of this is completely predictable to the audience -- Petzold telegraphs all his effects well in advance of events actually occurring.)  Of course, the Kafkaesque situation is fatal.  No one gets out alive.  In the last shot, Georg seems to greet the ghost that has suddenly been conscripted into the film to provide a suitably eerie ending.  

None of this is really convincing.   If the viewer is alert to the nuances of the European art-film, much of the picture is predictable, a condition that evinces a failure of the imagination at worst, or sloppiness at best.  In one scene, a music conductor explains that he has 'transit' to Caracas and, giddily, looks forward to his future in that place.  He is naively hopeful and, so, the viewer knows that this poor bastard is a goner -- he won't survive through the reel (if movies now had reels.)