Transit

A moment of repose in Transit

Christian Petzold's Transit transposes the narrative of Anna Seyhers' 1944 novel, set in a France falling under Nazi occupation in 1940, to the paranoid present. Franz Resgowski plays Georg, a German refugee who assumes the identity of a dead writer in order to leave France. The film's portrait of besieged emigres is a response to Europe's refugee influx, as in Kaurismaki's Le Havre, Dumont's P'tit Quinquin, Noe's Climax and many more.

Georg, as he waits for visas and transit out of Marseilles, becomes entwined with a widow searching for her husband and a widowed mother whose husband Georg was on the lam with. Petzold's widescreen compositions emphasize the lateral movements of escape. Contrapuntally, the characters are constantly being hemmed in by police, guardsman and railway bulls. This sense becomes more pronounced as Georg is trapped in Marseilles waiting for his ship out,

Petzold conjures a mood of romantic fatalism, to the final twist. The lovers in Transit are ambivalent about their choices, be they concerning emigration or elective affinities. Petzold and his cohorts have fashioned a passionately wrought work about heroism in the face of doom. Transit is one of the past year's best films, capping a decade of work that rivals any of this era.