Transit

Christian Petzold’s Transit is a cubist narrative, but the difference between it and say “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” is that the Picasso masterpiece is about a whorehouse. Here the experience of watching the movie is a little like pickup sticks. There are strands of narrative which center around refugees and exile and in particular the question of who forgets, the person being left or the person who leaves? However, the real subject is veiled in a series of dead ends. The air of mystery is aided and abetted by the fact that the movie inhabits an alternate universe in which the Nazi occupation of France is taking place in the present time (the movie is actually based on novel by Anna Seghers written in l942). In this sense it’s a little like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There are four deaths in Transit and each of them is someone that the film’s protagonist Georg (Franz Rogowski) tries or in fact succeeds coming into contact with. The message might be stay away from this guy. Add to this that the fact that one of the deceased is a writer named Weidel whose identity is fungible and becomes the source of a hard to come by exit visa. The confusion is increased by the fact that much of the plot is farmed out to yet another voice, that of the bartender who apparently has witnessed much of the action and is writing about it in retrospect. Weidel’s writing also plays a cameo role as part of the evidence which Georg uses in establishing his identity before his interlocutor at the American consulate. Talk about unreliable narrators. Nothing seems to be consummated in the film, not escape, nor even a sexual act with the dead writer’s vampish wife, Marie (Paula Beer).