Transit

In Christian Petzold's adaptation, subject and time are deliberately out of joint. The source is Anna Seghers's novel, written during the Second World War. The story is set in 1940: the Germans are advancing into France, people are fleeing south, and a crowd forms at the port of Marseille. Everyone is after a visa, a transit paper, a ship's ticket. Petzold did not shoot it as a period film. The clothes, the cars and the city are the Marseille of today, while the events proceed as in the novel. Two times stand in the same image and the film never explains it. A man called Georg takes on the identity of a dead writer and tries to get a visa with it. Then he meets the writer's wife; she is looking for her husband and Georg does not tell her the truth. The subject is the condition of waiting: identity, papers and borders. These worked the same way eighty years ago and today, and the director's choice says exactly that. Franz Rogowski plays Georg and Paula Beer the woman. A strong work for anyone who likes modern German cinema and formal experiment. For a viewer expecting a clear context, the film explains nothing and leaves the dislocation of time as a puzzle.