If I mention “Letters of
Transit”, I imagine most of my readers will immediately conjure up Humphrey
Bogart at Rick’s Café Américain in 1942 Casablanca, Morocco - and the desperate refugees there, among them Ilse Lund (Ingrid Bergman) and
Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), trying to escape the fascist onslaught by any
means available. Well, try to imagine wartime Casablanca transplanted to the
French port of Marseille, but an alternate universe Marseille; one that looks
quite contemporary, yet is lacking any sort of digital technology – thus, no
mobile phones or computers – and where, it seems, air transportation is not an
option (and may not even exist). Like
WWII Casablanca, this place is teeming with refugees – not just Europeans this
time, but also North Africans and perhaps even Syrians or other Middle Easterners,
all trying to get out.
Imagine further that there is
no real hope of resistance, and you’ll have a rough idea of the world of Transit,
as conjured by German director- auteur Christian Petzold [Barbara (2012), Phoenix
(2014)].
Transit is an intriguing, shadowy, claustrophobic and
curiously untethered thriller-drama – held together by its atmosphere of
mystery, a mood that blends slender hopes with pervasive despair, and the
undeniable charisma of it’s lead actor, Franz Rogowski – a guy who bears an
uncanny resemblance to a young, intense Joaquin Phoenix. It’s a film possessing
a spare, dreamlike, almost surreal quality, and an outline of a story, adapted
from Anna Seghers’ 1942 novel – also called Transit
and actually set in wartime France.
Rogowski plays Georg, a concentration
camp escapee with some agency, but few, if any, prospects and little hope. Why
he was incarcerated is not explained and doesn’t matter much; with a shadowy
past and wanted by the Germans, he’s got to get out of Paris and then out of
the country, pronto. He is asked to deliver a letter to a writer named Weidel but
finds the man dead. Weidel has, however, left behind a manuscript and a case of
papers, among them letters of transit for himself and his estranged wife, Marie,
who is in Marseille. Georg hops a
freight train and he too makes his way to Marseille. Once there, he assumes the
identity of Weidel, and wends his way through the bureaucratic mire seeking to
book transatlantic passage on a steamer.
Georg is not a cynical tough
guy in the Bogart mold; although he can be tough, he’s adrift and uncertain –
not unlike many of the other refugees around him. One senses that he’d like to
be as rock-hard as Bogie’s Rick Blaine in the face of the approaching calamity,
but what we see is a man who’s sick at heart, eventually bordering on
hopelessness. But then, waiting in Marseille, Georg also meets Marie (Paula
Beer, the lead actress in Never Look Away
(2018), the subject of my last review). Marie is something of an Ilse analogue,
albeit more mysterious and less clearly anchored in the plot than Bergman’s
character was. She has heard that her husband is in town and is searching for
him. Hmmm.
In Marseille, we also meet a
few of the many other victims: a blind widow and her young son, Driss, to whom
Georg takes a particular shine; a (presumably) Jewish woman whose ticket to
freedom are the two dogs of her employers, who’ve already made it there; a desperate
physician who is seeking to buy letters of transit; a family of North Africans
in a studio apartment. As another writer
has said, the whole town is like a giant waiting room. People are caught with
no way back and no way forward. Caught between death and life, they fear the
former and yearn for at least some form of the latter.
While the sketchy plot-line
may be problematic for some, what Petzold has done is open up the story in a
way that allows us to form our own opinions, and to find parallels between the fascist
horrors and displacements of the known past – and current and future mass
migrations: people fleeing violence, despotism, ethnic cleansing, plus drought,
starvation, flooding, and other anticipated near-term effects of climate change,
with no place to go.
Petzold has put a face to
this, made it out-of-time, yet contemporary, heartbreaking and human.
If Transit has a fault, it’s
a hard to pin down sense of remove, the feeling that we are observing from a
place that’s a shade too detached from the on-screen events. Nonetheless, it manages
to be both absorbing and intellectually and emotionally provocative.
1 hour 41 minutes In German and French,
with English subtitles.
Grade: B+
Opening in select theaters
beginning March 1, 2019 In New York City. March 22 in San Francisco (Clay Theater) and Berkeley
(Shattuck).
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