Christian Petzold (2018)
The unusual approach that Christian Petzold has taken in adapting Anna Seghers’ Transit Visa for cinema is reflected in varying descriptions, in reviews of the film and elsewhere, of when his version of the story is taking place. Seghers’ novel, first published in 1944, is set in France shortly after the Nazi invasion. According to the book’s Wikipedia entry, Petzold ‘transposes the novel’s plot to the twenty-first century’ but Variety’s review headline announces a ‘daring modern-dress [my italics] Holocaust drama’. The BFI website introduces the protagonist as ‘a runaway from the Third Reich in modern-day Marseille’. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw echoes that summary, referring to ‘a 1940s drama with 21st-century cars and streetscapes and police uniforms’ – although there’s no IT. There are no swastika flags either but the Stars and Stripes is strongly in evidence in the streets of Marseille. Bradshaw also notes that ‘the film glints with certain topical resonances …’
Before he goes to Marseille, Georg (Franz Rogowski) is asked by a friend in Paris (Sebastian Hülk) to deliver a letter to a writer named Weidel. Georg, a member of a(n undefined) minority group persecuted by the regime now occupying France, wants to get out of Europe altogether. When he discovers that Weidel has committed suicide and left behind a suitcase containing, as well as an unfinished manuscript for a novel, documents including a visa for entry to Mexico, Georg assumes the writer’s identity and prepares to book passage on a ship bound for America. In the meantime, he makes a series of acquaintances in Marseille which have the effect of complicating his intended departure: a young boy Driss (Lilien Batman) and his mother (Maryam Zaree), refugees in France; an architect (Barbara Auer), primarily concerned with arranging overseas travel for her pet dogs; Richard (Godehard Giese), a doctor who treats Driss when he suffers an acute asthma attack; and the doctor’s lover Marie (Paula Beer) – a woman whom Georg briefly encounters several times before he’s actually introduced to her. Although they’re in a relationship, Marie isn’t committed to Richard. When Georg falls in love with her, she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings either. Marie’s priority is to find her missing husband. Georg knows that her search will be in vain: her husband was Weidel.
Petzold’s complicated treatment is puzzling – in effect and in terms of motivation. Films set in the past but which we’re told are politically relevant today are hardly unusual. How much less of a cautionary tale – about the rise of right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic and Europe’s refugee crisis – would Transit have been if Petzold had told Anna Seghers’ story straightforwardly? The result of not doing so is distinctive but inert. Period pieces sometimes fail to come to life on the screen because a director, while getting the external details right, hasn’t been able to capture the era in more penetrating ways. In the case of Transit, the underlying material is rooted in a specific historical time and place, which Petzold has left essentially unchanged. All that the present-day trappings do is put the proceedings in inverted commas and in limbo: Transit doesn’t seem to be happening in the past or the present. (The suggestion by some critics, and by IMDb, that the film therefore qualifies as science fiction is generous.) The voiceover narrative, which does change Seghers’ equivalent, makes matters worse. In the novel, the (unnamed) protagonist tells his own story. In the film, a Marseille bartender (Matthias Brandt) tells us what Georg told him. The narration accompanies images of what actually occurred. These are sometimes at variance with what the voiceover is saying but not to any startling extent: the bartender may be an unreliable narrator but he’s more conspicuously a dull one.
Franz Rogowski (he was Isabelle Huppert’s son in Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017)) has a background in contemporary dance. His strong, somewhat mask-like face suggests a dancer too but Rogowski has presence and integrity as Georg. His voice is constricted yet his readings are often expressive, especially in the scenes with the boy Driss and his mother, both of whom are affectingly played. Paula Beer, who’s shown her talents elsewhere, is largely under wraps, though she brings off Marie’s switches between despair and animation with impressive ease. Barbara Auer’s interpretation of the architect consists mainly of too long-held significant looks in Georg’s direction. The cast also includes (at least) two actors from the German television drama Babylon Berlin – Godehard Giese and Matthias Brandt. The latter was excellent as the Jewish head of the political police in Babylon Berlin but he’s not right here. His solemn, sonorous tones – this is one classy barman – emphasise the artificial, literary quality of the narration.
When Marie sees Georg in the streets of Marseille before they’ve been introduced, she rushes excitedly towards him. In retrospect, it seems that she thinks she’s spotted her husband. Once she and Georg get talking, however, Marie never mentions any such resemblance. This mystery goes unexplained. It’s a safe bet that a film involving identity theft will be praised for its exploration of existential themes, especially if it’s cryptic (The Passenger syndrome), and Transit has been lauded accordingly. Thanks to the wartime letters-of-transit element, the love triangle(s) and the atmosphere of inescapability, it’s also been hailed as a ‘super-Kafkaesque remake of Casablanca’ (David Ehrlich on IndieWire). The claustrophobia experienced by this member of the audience had little to do with the characters’ predicament as victims either of political evil or of the human condition. Transit is, rather, a matter of Christian Petzold holding us in a stylistic vice of his own making.
18 August 2019
