German filmmakers have, of late, been revisiting the 20th century, exploring their nation’s tortured record under the Nazis and, later, Communism. On the heels of his fine two previous features, Barbara (2012), about an East Berlin dissident physician’s banishment to the provinces, and Phoenix (2014), in which a Jewish Holocaust concentration camp survivor, newly remodeled by plastic surgery, returns to Berlin to confront the lover who informed on her, writer-director Christian Petzold turns his gaze to France under Germany’s wartime occupation. Adapting Anna Seghers’s eponymous 1944 novel about hordes of refugees flocking to 1942 Marseille to keep one step ahead of Hitler’s advancing armies, Petzold sticks fairly closely to the author’s plot, but he introduces a time shift in the physical setting: spray-painted wall graffiti, modern architecture and vehicles, and riot police in SWAT team gear instead of swastikas announce that this is the present day. It’s a daring stylistic move, one which frequently keeps the viewer as disoriented as the story’s desperate characters and helps make the film a profound meditation on the dehumanizing condition of statelessness.
If it was that difficult for a connected intellectual like Arendt to get out of World War II Europe and start over again, how hard must it be for disenfranchised migrants today—the millions fleeing war, or persecution, or famine, drought, floods, earthquakes or other natural disasters around the globe—to gain entrance to a country, any country, where they can actually remain alive? The movie Transit implicitly asks this question in sequences where Georg seeks out the family of one of his colleagues, an injured man who died aboard the boxcar in which he and Georg were heading to Marseille. Georg befriends the deceased man’s deaf-mute North African widow and young son; so well do they all get along it’s almost as though he has found a second home. But he is also drawn to Weidel’s widow (Paula Beer of Frantz and Never Look Away), and Georg is actively trying to arrange her escape as well, so he leaves his new surrogate family for a time. Later in the film, when he looks for them again, he finds that, left without any protector, they have departed for the hills and their flat is now occupied by a large number of new arrivals from Africa.
Directed by Christian Petzold. In German and French with subtitles. 101 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $12.
