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Transit
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Love and the System
German director Christian Peztold is a fan of film
melodrama. But he prefers the Rainer Werner Fassbinder approach over the general
Hollywood approach to this genre: that is to say, he is less drawn to
redemptive sentimentality than to a keen sense of everything in our complex
emotional relations that is difficult, conflicted, mistaken, delusional or
out-of-phase.
Transit, like many earlier Petzold works,
is an agonising parade of unsynchronised encounters: its characters arrive to a
rendezvous where the other party is already dead, or mysteriously vanished; or they
project the identity of somebody who is missing onto somebody else who happens
to be present; or they stare longingly out of windows at other people who are
setting out on a great journey – people who are effectively replacing them in their
one chance to escape a hellish world.
The reasons for all this rampant, switching-around
confusion are to be found in the historical context. Transit is set in France in 1940, mainly in the port city of Marseille.
Georg (Franz Rogowski), a German Jew, is hiding, like his compatriots, from the
Gestapo patrolling Occupied France. A strange sequence of dangerous events
places Georg in Marseille, where he carries the papers of the writer Weidel –
documents that include his final, unpublished manuscript.
To Georg’s silent surprise, the transit authorities
mistake him for Weidel (many will be reminded here of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger [1975]), thus allowing him
the possibility of a passage to Mexico and then the United States. (Historically,
this is more or less the same passage that Siegfried Kracauer and his wife Lili agonisingly
waited for in Marseille.)
Even more uncannily, the woman who previously left
Weidel, Marie (Paula Beer), keeps publicly mistaking Georg for her partner –
and this leads, down the track, to perverse complications, especially when
Richard (Godehard Giese), the doctor that Georg turns to for help in another
situation, is revealed to be also involved with Marie.
The source novel of Transit was written by Anna Seghers in 1942; she, too, waited for papers
of passage in Marseille, and was there when her friend, the famous cultural critic Walter Benjamin, also
seeking transit but overcome by the mounting demands and pressures, fled and eventually
killed himself on the French-Spanish border. Petzold has done an extraordinary screenwriting
job of paring down Seghers’ book to its most basic, essential elements.
Take the role of the narrator, who is the barman at
the pizza place where many scenes occur – and thus the recipient, over time, of
every visitor’s unfortunate or tragic tale. Seghers, speaking through this
character, provides a lengthy exposition of the time and place, before the main
characters even appear. Petzold inflects this in an entirely different
direction. When the narrator’s voice is first heard, without any set-up, we
have no idea who he is within the world of the fiction; and we do not get a
good, direct look at him until right near the end. His disembodied words, as
featured throughout, play a teasing game with our faculties of comprehension,
guessing and imagining – it is a narrating voice sometimes omniscient, and at
other times as unknowing or speculative as anybody else around.
As often in Petzold’s cinema, a literal life-and-death
question – who exists, who is a phantom? – haunts the edges of Transit. Yet, right alongside such lofty
issues, there is equal attention paid to the modest achievements of daily life
– as when Georg cements his friendship with a little boy, Driss (Lilien
Batman), by patiently fixing his radio.
Petzold is a strikingly to-the-point director. His
style is lean and minimalistic; no shots are wasted, and no scene is
unnecessarily padded. He has a strong sense of framing and the dynamic use of
screen space: apparently simple images are frequently given tension by the
presence of what is nearby, just off-screen, or fleetingly viewable through a
window or doorway.
The direction of his superb actors fits this mode
exactly: they remain contained, nervy, rarely demonstrative. Petzold’s
inspiration on the formal, filmmaking plane is twofold: he appreciates the most
severe methods of European and Asian art cinema (such as the films of Robert
Bresson), but equally the no-nonsense American B movies of the 1940s and ‘50s,
especially those involving urban crime, like Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contract (1958).
This is a taste in cinema that Petzold shared with his
teacher and former script collaborator, the gallery artist and filmmaker Harun
Farocki (1944-2014). It is to Farocki that Transit is dedicated – he was the first to bring Seghers’ novel to Petzold’s attention,
at a time when Seghers, as a committedly Communist author living in East
Germany, was generally derided in West Germany. In fact, Petzold told interviewer Jordan
Cronk in Film Comment that he and Farocki read the novel together “approximately once a year” and
that “all of the screenplays that we developed together were
more or less based” on it.
It only takes a few minutes of watching Transit for its most remarkable aspect
to become evident, and even (as Petzold surely wishes) intrusive. The film makes
not the slightest effort to recreate the period setting of the 1940s, beyond
keeping the costumes simple and relatively timeless, and banishing most modern
gadgets (like computers) from the centre of the frame – rather in the manner
that Philippe Garrel does, as a rule.
In the many street shots, however, ads for mobile
phones, for example, adorn entirely modern shops; and an LED screen beams
images on the wall of the Mexican Embassy. This kind of stripped-back artifice
is common in theatre but far less common in cinema, because it is considered
unworkably unrealistic. Not since Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 1960s has a filmmaker
so brazenly staged a story against such a patently “wrong” backdrop.
This is not mere affectation, or cleverness on a
relatively low budget. Petzold is appealing to our sense that the plight of
immigrants and refugees is hardly any different today than 80 years ago. Perhaps, in some countries, it still involves
the same offices in the same stolid buildings – just a different generation of
bureaucrats. And, without a doubt, the same procedures are in place: the
waiting, the complications, the endless multiplication of documents, and the
crushing rejections based on the slightest official whim or pretext.
Politically, Petzold seems to be suggesting, it
doesn’t make a heck of a lot of difference whether the governments that rule
over such a system are of the left or the right. Of course, the historical
elements of the World War II situation are firmly part of Transit’s story: there are constant reminders of the horror of the
concentration camps and the grotesque “cleansing” of Jews from the population.
Yet, while Petzold underlines the clear affinity
between the Nazism of that time and the various neo-Nazi or fascist movements
of today, he is also careful to avoid channelling our righteous feelings as spectators
against some stereotypically visible caricature of “Nazi villainy”. The evil in
this story is decidedly banal and everyday – a matter of the callousness and
corruption of systems, not races, nations or individual monsters.
Indeed, Petzold thinks of his last three films – Transit, Phoenix (2014) and Barbara (2012) – as a trilogy he privately calls “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems”.
His next trilogy, he assures us, will be about fairy tales and myths. But will
it be any happier or more reassuring? I doubt it.
© Adrian Martin April 2019 |
