‘Transit’ Is Christian Petzold’s Confounding Take On ‘Casablanca’ [Berlin Review]

There was a conceptual gap, a kink in the weave, a run in the stocking of German director Christian Petzold‘s last film, “Phoenix” which largely defined one’s response to it. Impeccably crafted and quite beautifully performed, the post-war story nonetheless hinges on a basic contrivance about a husband not recognizing his wife due to reconstructive surgery. For some of us, no matter how much we admire its silky, slinky filmmaking, it proved a sticking point.

Petzold’s new Berlin competition title “Transit,” far from moving away from that divisive device, seems to take place almost wholly within a similar crack in believability, worrying at it, widening it and calling attention to it as never before. Within this plausibility wormhole, Petzold packs in whole volumes of references, sliced and diced and shiftingly assembled into a postmodern Magic-Eye mosaic that is beautiful and clever, but coldly elusive to the point of outright frustration at times.

Anna Seghers’ 1944 German-language occupation novel, also called “Transit,”  is very famous in Germany, and forms the film’s ostensible basis. But it is shredded and pummelled and recontextualized here, along with half the history of 20th century Europe, a couple of incomplete prints of Michael Curtiz‘ incomparable “Casablanca,” and more than a few current chyron headlines about immigration, ethnic strife and the refugee crisis. Quite whether it’s justified, to use such heady disparate source materials to decorate what is essentially, like many Petzold films, an examination of the glitchy nature of identity, may be the biggest question the film will fail to answer. But it won’t be the only one.

“Transit” is a more overt puzzle-box than any of his prior titles, and it takes a few moments to settle in to the rhythm of being constantly unsettled. A terrific Franz Rogowski, further consolidating his position as Germany’s Joaquin Phoenix, and delivering his lines in a nervy Brando mumble, is Georg, a displaced German in contemporary Paris who is tasked with bringing some letters to a certain hotel room. At least, it seems like contemporary Paris — yet the typewriter in the hotel room is an antique, passports are hand-stamped paper documents, and no one uses a mobile phone. But the riot police gathering in alleyways and the police vans that careen around streetcorners are definitely those of today: this is a kind of alternate-history Paris, then, where people talk in hushed tones about the “occupation,” and hoteliers immediately assume that Georg is with the authorities because of his German-accented French. It is today and it is 1942 and it is also neither.

Like almost everyone, it seems, Georg wants out of France and when he discovers that Weidel, the intended recipient of the letters and a famous writer, has committed suicide despite having transit visas for himself and his absent wife at his disposal, he almost accidentally, almost blamelessly, assumes his identity. He scoots to Marseilles, having also snaffled Weidel’s last manuscript, but en route his friend dies and Georg must inform his widow and young, football-mad son (excellent newcomer Lilien Batman).

Meanwhile an elusive young woman, Marie (Paula Beer) keeps turning up and briefly mistaking Georg for her husband, then slipping away. She is, of course, the wife of the dead writer and she’s looking for him, despite having been the one to have left him in the first place. (“There are no songs about the one who leaves,” she says at one point, suggesting that this is also a world without Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits or “Freebird.”) Eventually she and Georg meet properly, introduced by Marie’s doctor lover (Godehard Giese), the third point in the film’s love triangle (or fourth, if you count the dead Weidel).

Of course, nothing happens in quite this order, and the film is frequently punctuated by deliberately redundant, almost French New Wave-esque third person narration. Phrases like “he told me” and “he said later” do start to crop up, and somewhat help to triangulate the narrator’s perspective before his identity is revealed (and the herring turns out to be bright red). But before that, its effect is paranoiac and disquieting. With Marie already slipping in and out of sight, more a recurring memory of footsteps, backward glances and the tinkling of the bell on a bistro door than a real woman, there’s even further reason to search your peripheral vision to work out who is watching Georg and why. Tiny discrepancies between what we see and what we hear are magnified and we can’t know if the unseen narrator’s intent is benign or malevolent. It also presents some practical complications for the non-German speaker, exemplified by one hotel room scene in which Marie is talking and the voiceover speaks over her, reporting her words almost contiguously with her saying them. The resulting blizzard of nearly identical subtitles whip by so quickly one longs for a pause button.

All of this unbalancing, wrong-footing mischief may very well be part of the point. But it’s hard to tell what it’s actually all for — clear away the smoke and take down the mirrors and there isn’t much left to tether all the intricacies to a core of real meaning or heart. Rogowski is a wonderfully grounding presence, but Beer, with her semi-translucent, alabaster skin is almost an abstraction (it rather makes one miss Petzold’s regular muse Nina Hoss, who always brought a certain sensual solidity to even her most enigmatic roles for him). And so the grand romance between Georg and Marie never attains any real erotic charge: their clinches are frictionless like one or other of them were not really there.

Identities explode in times of war just as surely as bombs do, and reassembling the pieces will never quite get you back to the real thing. Perhaps everything here is meant to be ersatz, like the chicory coffee  and sawdust flour that bulked up scarce resources during wartime rationing. Perhaps the limbo state of being forever in transit is apt punishment for thinking you can cheat your way into someone else’s skin, or someone else’s heart or someone else’s story. Be prepared to be challenged by the glittering, allusive and often bewitching “Transit,” but also to be frustrated on discovering that even if you manage to piece it all together, in this particular crazy world the problems of three little people ultimately don’t amount to a hill of beans. [B-]

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